Corrugator activity confirms immediate negative affect in surprise
Please always quote using this URN: urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-144068
- The emotion of surprise entails a complex of immediate responses, such as cognitive interruption, attention allocation to, and more systematic processing of the surprising stimulus. All these processes serve the ultimate function to increase processing depth and thus cognitively master the surprising stimulus. The present account introduces phasic negative affect as the underlying mechanism responsible for this switch in operating mode. Surprising stimuli are schema discrepant and thus entail cognitive disfluency, which elicits immediateThe emotion of surprise entails a complex of immediate responses, such as cognitive interruption, attention allocation to, and more systematic processing of the surprising stimulus. All these processes serve the ultimate function to increase processing depth and thus cognitively master the surprising stimulus. The present account introduces phasic negative affect as the underlying mechanism responsible for this switch in operating mode. Surprising stimuli are schema discrepant and thus entail cognitive disfluency, which elicits immediate negative affect. This affect in turn works like a phasic cognitive tuning switching the current processing mode from more automatic and heuristic to more systematic and reflective processing. Directly testing the initial elicitation of negative affect by surprising events, the present experiment presented high and low surprising neutral trivia statements to N = 28 participants while assessing their spontaneous facial expressions via facial electromyography. High compared to low surprising trivia elicited higher corrugator activity, indicative of negative affect and mental effort, while leaving zygomaticus (positive affect) and frontalis (cultural surprise expression) activity unaffected. Future research shall investigate the mediating role of negative affect in eliciting surprise-related outcomes.…
Author: | Sascha Topolinski, Fritz Strack |
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URN: | urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-144068 |
Document Type: | Journal article |
Faculties: | Fakultät für Humanwissenschaften (Philos., Psycho., Erziehungs- u. Gesell.-Wissensch.) / Institut für Psychologie |
Language: | English |
Parent Title (English): | Frontiers in Psychology |
Year of Completion: | 2015 |
Volume: | 6 |
Issue: | 134 |
Source: | Frontiers in Psychology (2015) Vol. 6, Article 134. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00134 |
DOI: | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00134 |
Dewey Decimal Classification: | 1 Philosophie und Psychologie / 15 Psychologie / 150 Psychologie |
Tag: | EMG; affect; attention; elevator EMG activity; emotion; expectancy; facial expressions; intuition; judgments; memory; phasic affective modulation; processing fluency; semantic coherence; surprise |
Release Date: | 2018/06/04 |
Licence (German): | CC BY: Creative-Commons-Lizenz: Namensnennung 4.0 International |