Emotion misattribution from complex scene pictures : Evidence for affective processing beyond valence

Abstract

The present experiments employed an emotion misattribution procedure to investigate if, and to what extent, emotional pictures are automatically processed on an emotion-specific level. We employed emotional pictures from the International Affective Picture System (Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 2008) depicting joy-, anger-, fear-, and sadness-related contents as prime stimuli in the four-category emotion misattribution procedure (Rohr, Degner, & Wentura, 2015). Pictures were presented briefly and masked to avoid intentional responding. The pattern of results across all experiments provides evidence for an unfolding of emotion specificity along with the degree of visibility of primes. When presentation duration allowed for relatively good prime visibility (40 ms; Experiment 1), we observed emotion-specific misattribution effects for each prime category. With shorter prime presentation reducing prime visibility (30 ms; Experiment 2a and 2b), misattribution effects became less specific: While anger-related emotional scenes were clearly differentiated from fear and sadness-associated scenes, the latter two were not differentiated from one another. This pattern cannot be explained by simple semantic processing, but fits to an early appraisal of the coping ability associated with the emotion triggered by the pictorial content highlighting that specific, emotion-related processes are involved at the very early stages of emotional information processing.