Effects of Mood/Emotion

Positive

(Jackson & Arlegui-Prieto, 2016)

sample comprised healthy young adults, and current mood state was measured using the PANAS-X.
Participants pressed a key as soon as they (1) noticed a physical change in expression (perceptual
sensitivity—novel task element), and (2) could clearly conceptualize which expression was emerging
(conceptual sensitivity). Increased positive mood reduced perceptual and conceptual sensitivity to
angry and sad expressions only (a mood incongruency effect). increased negative mood decreased
conceptual sensitivity for all expressions, but had limited impact on perceptual sensi- tivity. This may
reflect greater introspection and consumption of attentional resources directed toward the negative
self, leaving fewer resources to process emotional signals conveyed by others (Resource allocation
model)

Negative

(Baillon et al., 2016)

Some recent investigations (Lerner & Keltner, 2000, 2001; Raghunathan & Pham, 1999) have
highlighted the importance of examining more discrete emotional states, showing that specific
negative emotions such as anger and fear differentially impact judgment and decision-making
outcomes. Different positive emotions (e.g., pride versus cheerfulness) or different negative
emotions (e.g., anger versus sadness) may have different orthogonal structures (e.g., Russell, 1980;
Watson & Tellegen, 1985), different informative values (e.g., Pham, 1998; Schwarz, 1990), and
different cognitive determinants (e.g., Lazarus, 2001; Roseman & Smith, 2001).

(Kragel & LaBar, 2016)

Although emotions can be understood by studying features shared across emotional states, such as
their valence or arousal, categorical models instead focus on differences in the antecedent events,
neural circuitry, and behavioral outputs specific to each emotion [43]. These models commonly posit
that emotions are experienced as independent categories in humans and are differentiated in their
neurophysiological expression. Following this logic, a number of experiments have been conducted
using fMRI with the goal of classifying neural activity along multiple distinct emotion categories.

Sad

(Lee et al., 2008):

if there were indeed biased judgment of facial expressions by people in a sad mood, would the bias
be emotion- specific (i.e. consistent negativity) (Ekman, 1992) or emotion-general (i.e. general
impairment in decoding facial expressions of any emotion types)?

judgment of ambiguous facial emotion expressions among 47 healthy volunteers who had been
induced to feel sad (n=13), neutral (n=15), or happy (n=19) emotions by watching video clips (about
15min each selected by 10 independent judges. The happy clip was an excerpt froma comedy.The
neutral clip was taken from a TV special on a smoking cessation campaign. The sad clip was from a
documentary on a Tsunami disaster). The participants' judgment of the emotions was assesed using
Visual Analogue Scales (VASs) consisting of a set of 10-cm-long horizontal lines, each labeled on the
left with one emotion (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, or disgust). Judgments of sadness, anger,
fear, and disgustwere summed as the total negative rating,while judgments of happinessmade up the
positive rating. When the targets were ambiguous, participants who were in a sad mood tended to
classify them in the negative emotional categories rather than the positive emotional categories. The
observed mood-congruent negative bias was best predicted by spatial perception (Judgment of Line
Orientation Test).

Some studies have demonstrated the existence of emotion-specific negative bias in the judgment of
facial expressions by people in a depressed mood (Gur et al., 1992;Bouhuys et al., 1995;Hale, 1998).
But it also has been found that depressed patients have decreased sen- sitivity to emotion-related
stimuli compared with controls (Bouhuys et al., 1999). Furthermore, a general impair- ment in
decoding facial expressions, regardless of the type of emotion involved, manifested in the formof
decreased accuracy of recognition by depressed patients, has been suggested (Zuroff and Colussy,
1986).

Bouhuys, Bloem & Groothuis (1995) Depression related bias in the perception of facial displays

After listening to depressing music, 11 subjects showed substantial differences in assessment of faces
showing clear/ambiguous signs of emotions.

Further analysis:

perceived more rejection/sadness in ambiguous faces

perceived less invitation/happiness in clear faces

more fear in clear faces that express less intensive emotions

Happy

Angry

Excited

Fearful