Psych 353: Personality Psychology
Masuda et al., 2012
Oct 31, 2013
Coltan Thompson
Masuda et al. make an interesting preliminary point: that priming participants with
conspicuous stimuli, such as various scenery, influences how participants interpret an emotion
(Masuda et al., 2012). This finding alone goes against our commonsensical assumption that we
read emotions as they are. We can admit that the situation effects how we read people’s
reactions—many emotions appear similar in the face, such as fear and surprise (individual
differences are important too: some people’s faces are harder to “read” than others). The
situation helps us interpret emotion. But what this finding by Mesuda et al. suggests is that
negative or positive stimuli “set the mood” for subsequent interpretation; that is, the stimulus
offers a kind of backdrop for the emotion and suggests a reading of it. However, what exactly is
happening is left unclear because the conspicuous stimuli participants were primed with were not
just any stimuli, they were contextual in nature. The two scenes mentioned as stimuli were a
sunny beach and a ruined building. Because they are scenes, they suggest entities to inhabit
them, which participants receive in the face of the person following the stimulus. So it is perhaps
unlikely that the positive or negative nature of a general stimulus affects emotion interpretation
(although this would be an excellent research question); it seems that emotion interpretation is
affected only by contextual stimuli.
Important because context helps us distinguish between emotional reactions which might
otherwise seem remarkably similar
Look at other individualistic and collectivist cultures