Effects of emotion concepts on perceptual memory for emotional expressions

Three experiments tested the hypothesis that explaining emotional expressio ns using specific emotion concepts at encoding biases perceptual memory for those expressions. In Experiment 1, participants viewed faces expressing b lends of happiness and anger and created explanations of why the target peo ple were expressing one of the two emotions, according to concepts provided by the experimenter. Later, participants attempted to identify the facial expressions in computer movies, in which the previously seen faces changed continuously from anger to happiness. Faces conceptualized in terms of ange r were remembered as angrier than the same faces conceptualized in terms of happiness, regardless of whether the explanations were told aloud or imagi ned. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that explanation is necessary for the conce ptual biases to emerge fully and extended the finding to anger-sad expressi ons, an emotion blend more common in real life.