Corrugator activity confirms immediate negative affect in surprise

Frontiers in Psychology
Sascha Topolinski, Fritz Strack

Abstract

The emotion of surprise entails a complex of immediate responses, such as cognitive interruption, attention allocation to, and more systematic processing of the surprising stimulus. All these processes serve the ultimate function to increase processing depth and thus cognitively master the surprising stimulus. The present account introduces phasic negative affect as the underlying mechanism responsible for this switch in operating mode. Surprising stimuli are schema-discrepant and thus entail cognitive disfluency, which elicits immediate negative affect. This affect in turn works like a phasic cognitive tuning switching the current processing mode from more automatic and heuristic to more systematic and reflective processing. Directly testing the initial elicitation of negative affect by surprising events, the present experiment presented high and low surprising neutral trivia statements to N = 28 participants while assessing their spontaneous facial expressions via facial electromyography. High compared to low surprising trivia elicited higher corrugator activity, indicative of negative affect and mental effort, while leaving zygomaticus (positive affect) and frontalis (cultural surprise expression) activity unaffected. Future...Continue Reading

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Citations

Apr 10, 2015·Cognition·Sascha TopolinskiRolf Reber
Sep 1, 2015·Frontiers in Psychology·Beate SeibtPeter Weyers
Jun 2, 2015·Frontiers in Psychology·Sascha TopolinskiIris K Schneider
May 20, 2016·Acta Psychologica·Andrey Chetverikov, Árni Kristjánsson
Jan 15, 2019·Experimental Psychology·Thorsten Michael Erle, Sascha Topolinski
Sep 25, 2017·Topics in Cognitive Science·Rainer ReisenzeinAchim Schützwohl
Sep 7, 2018·Cognition & Emotion·Marret K Noordewier, Eric van Dijk
Feb 5, 2019·Frontiers in Psychology·Sylwia HyniewskaCatherine Pelachaud
Nov 3, 2017·Frontiers in Psychology·Fang TianGuikang Cao
Dec 24, 2018·Topics in Cognitive Science·Edward L MunnichMark T Keane
Jun 1, 2017·Frontiers in Psychology·Martina JakeschHelmut Leder
Oct 6, 2020·Frontiers in Neuroscience·Motofumi Sumiya, Kentaro Katahira
Aug 29, 2021·Biological Psychology·Marret K NoordewierMuriel A Hagenaars

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