Seeing What You Feel: Affect Drives Visual Perception of Structurally Neutral Faces
研究通过连续闪烁抑制技术，在参与者无意识状态下呈现情感图片，发现无意识情感刺激会改变对中性面孔的视觉感知，使其看起来更开心或更生气。
Affective realism, the phenomenon whereby affect is integrated into an individual's experience of the world, is a normal consequence of how the brain processes sensory information from the external world in the context of sensations from the body. In the present investigation, we provided compelling empirical evidence that affective realism involves changes in visual perception (i.e., affect changes how participants see neutral stimuli). In two studies, we used an interocular suppression technique, continuous flash suppression, to present affective images outside of participants' conscious awareness. We demonstrated that seen neutral faces are perceived as more smiling when paired with unseen affectively positive stimuli. Study 2 also demonstrated that seen neutral faces are perceived as more scowling when paired with unseen affectively negative stimuli. These findings have implications for real-world situations and challenge beliefs that affect is a distinct psychological phenomenon that can be separated from cognition and perception.