Emotional Response Congruent Categorization And Its Embodiment:An Experimental Examination

The traditional thinking about categorization emphasizes the role of cognition but pays little attention to emotion. The theory of emotional response categorization, on the contrary, holds that concepts can be grounded on specific emotional responses. Therefore re-experiencing associated feelings may automatically lead to the reorganization of conceptual space, and prompt the perceiver to group stimuli that elicit the same kind of emotional responses as "the same kind of thing"(Niedenthal, Halberstadt,&Innes-Ker,1999).In order to examine the effect of emotional response categorization among Chinese participants without resorting to similarity judgment, a new conceptual categorization paradigm was developed through extensive pilot studies, in which participants were asked to judge whether a target concept shared the category membership with two comparison concepts which were belong to the same category. Some of the target or comparison concepts or both were associated with certain emotions. Then, in three main experiments, participants’ emotional state were manipulated using emotional movie clips (Experiment1and Experiment2) or facial feedback manipulation (Experiment3). In Experiment1, participants watched a clip of sadness-arousing, disgust-arousing or neutral movie before completing each block of the conceptual categorization task. In Experiment2, participants completed a block of the conceptual categorization task before and after watching disgust-arousing or happiness-arousing movie clips. In Experiment3, participants completed the conceptual categorization task following a facial feedback procedure designed to arouse disgust feelings or neutral emotional state in an unobtrusive way.The major findings of this study are as follows:1. Individuals in sad, disgust and happy emotional states not only grouped concepts associated with the same emotion together but also discriminated between concepts that didn’t share an emotional association more than did individuals in a neutral mood.2. Individuals under specific emotional state were more sensitive to the emotional response categories that corresponded to their emotional state than to those associated with other emotions.3. Changes in emotional state led to changes in the pattern of conceptual categorization. Categorization according to emotional response categories increased after happy or disgust emotion manipulation compared with before manipulation.4. Under specific emotional state induced by facial feedback procedure, individuals increased the use of the corresponding emotional response category even though they cannot correctly identify the real source of their emotions.These results lent further support to the theory of emotional response categorization and helped to deepen our understanding of the interplay between emotion and higher-level cognition. Implications and potential applications of the findings were discussed.