Global-happy and local-sad: Perceptual processing affects emotion identification

Recent studies have shown that emotion affects cognitive processes including perception and attention. Emotion identification has been shown to differ under different condition of attention with happy faces linked to distributed attention and sad emotions to focused attention. Very few studies have explored whether perceptual processing affects emotion identification. Given links between emotions or mood with global-local processing, the present study investigated whether perceptual processing (global-local) affects emotion identification through a priming paradigm. In the experiment, emotional faces (sad or happy) were preceded by global-local digit stimuli. The results showed that global processing facilitates identification of happy faces and local processing facilitates identification of sad faces. This indicates a strong relationship between emotion identification and global-local processing mediated by differences in scope of attention or shared mechanisms in visual information processing.