Li Zhimeng, Lu Hanxiao, Liu Di, Yu Alessandra N C, Gendron Maria
Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA.
Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA.
Commun Psychol. 2023 Dec 18;1(1):45. doi: 10.1038/s44271-023-00039-4.
Inferring emotion is a critical skill that supports social functioning. Emotion inferences are typically studied in simplistic paradigms by asking people to categorize isolated and static cues like frowning faces. Yet emotions are complex events that unfold over time. Here, across three samples (Study 1 N = 222; Study 2 N = 261; Study 3 N = 101), we present the Emotion Segmentation Paradigm to examine inferences about complex emotional events by extending cognitive paradigms examining event perception. Participants were asked to indicate when there were changes in the emotions of target individuals within continuous streams of activity in narrative film (Study 1) and documentary clips (Study 2, preregistered, and Study 3 test-retest sample). This Emotion Segmentation Paradigm revealed robust and reliable individual differences across multiple metrics. We also tested the constructionist prediction that emotion labels constrain emotion inference, which is traditionally studied by introducing emotion labels. We demonstrate that individual differences in active emotion vocabulary (i.e., readily accessible emotion words) correlate with emotion segmentation performance.
推断情绪是一项支持社会功能的关键技能。情绪推断通常在简单的范式中进行研究，即要求人们对诸如皱眉表情等孤立且静态的线索进行分类。然而，情绪是随着时间展开的复杂事件。在此，我们通过扩展研究事件感知的认知范式，在三个样本（研究1，N = 222；研究2，N = 261；研究3，N = 101）中呈现情绪分割范式，以检验对复杂情绪事件的推断。参与者被要求指出在叙事电影（研究1）和纪录片片段（研究2，预先注册，研究3重测样本）的连续活动流中目标个体情绪何时发生变化。这种情绪分割范式揭示了多个指标上稳健且可靠的个体差异。我们还测试了建构主义的预测，即情绪标签会限制情绪推断，传统上是通过引入情绪标签来进行研究的。我们证明，主动情绪词汇（即容易获取的情绪词汇）的个体差异与情绪分割表现相关。
