We see things according to our emotions

Humans are active perceivers and everyday interactions and happenings of daily life can strongly shape people’s perceptions, finds study

Our emotional state in a given moment may influence what we see, according to a study which shows that humans are active perceivers. The findings published in the journal Psychological Science could have implications that extend from everyday social interactions to situations with more severe consequences.

For instance, they could be useful when judges or jury members have to evaluate whether a defendant is remorseful, researchers said. In two experiments, they found that participants saw a neutral face as smiling more when it was paired with an unseen positive image.

“We do not passively detect information in the world and then react to it - we construct perceptions of the world as the architects of our own experience. Our affective feelings are a critical determinant of the experience we create,” said Erika Siegel, a psychological scientist at University of California, San Francisco in the US.

In one experiment, 43 participants had a series of flashing images, which alternated between a pixelated image and a neutral face, presented to their dominant eye. At the same time, a low-contrast image of a smiling, scowling, or neutral face was presented to their non-dominant eye - typically, this image will be suppressed by the stimulus presented to the dominant eye and participants will not consciously experience it.

However, they tended to select faces that were smiling more as the best match if the image that was presented outside of their awareness showed a person who was smiling as opposed to neutral or scowling.