Emotions in “Black and White” or Shades of Gray? How We Think About Emotion Shapes Our Perception and Neural Representation of Emotion
通过心理测量和神经影像方法，研究发现使用非黑即白的分类思维来评判情绪，会改变主观情绪感知阈值，并影响大脑情感相关区域的活动，表明分类思维能主动塑造情绪感知和神经表征。
The demands of social life often require categorically judging whether someone's continuously varying facial movements express "calm" or "fear," or whether one's fluctuating internal states mean one feels "good" or "bad." In two studies, we asked whether this kind of categorical, "black and white," thinking can shape the perception and neural representation of emotion. Using psychometric and neuroimaging methods, we found that (a) across participants, judging emotions using a categorical, "black and white" scale relative to judging emotions using a continuous, "shades of gray," scale shifted subjective emotion perception thresholds; (b) these shifts corresponded with activity in brain regions previously associated with affective responding (i.e., the amygdala and ventral anterior insula); and (c) connectivity of these regions with the medial prefrontal cortex correlated with the magnitude of categorization-related shifts. These findings suggest that categorical thinking about emotions may actively shape the perception and neural representation of the emotions in question.