Effects of Emotional Intensity on the Subjective Difference in Emotional Intensisty in Lateralized Presentation of Faces

Aaron Wallace, Drew Martin, Brian Kujawa - Alma College
bkujawa41@hotmail.com

Previous studies (Sackheim, Gur, Saucy 1978) have shown that emotions are more intensely expressed in the left side of the face as compared to the right side of the face. This present study examines the effects of the intensity of the emotional expression upon the subjective emotional intensity rating of right and left faced emotional pictures. The hypothesis for this experiment is that as the emotional intensity of the pictures increases there will be an increased difference between the subjective emotional intensity rating between the left-face orientations as compared to right-face orientations. Also the left-face orientations will show significantly higher subjective emotional intensity than right-face orientations.

METHODS

In this experiment, 18 undergraduate college students were used (9 males, 9 females). The two emotions that were evaluated were happiness and surprise. The subjects were asked to rate the emotional intensity of faces that appeared on the screen on a 1 to 7 scale. 1 being the lowest emotional intensity and 7 being the highest emotional intensity. Subjects were then asked to rate the emotional intensity of six faces per emotion. One low-intensity normal, low-intensity right-faced, low-intensity left-faced, high-intensity normal, high-intensity right-faced, and high-intensity left-faced expressions.

RESULTS

For this experiment there were no significant differences (T(17) = .846 P>.05) in subjective emotional intensity for right-faced versus left-faced orientations for either emotion or emotional intensity setting as shown in Figure 1 and Figure 2.

Figure 1. Mean Subjective Emotional Intensties of "Happy" Emotional State with Normal, Right-Face, and Left-Face Orientations. This shows no differneces in subjective emotional intensity rating between left-face or right-face orientations in either emotional intnesity.

Figure 2. Mean Subjective Emotional Intensties of "Surprised" Emotional State with Normal, Right-Face, and Left-Face Orientations. This shows no differneces in subjective emotional intensity rating between left-face or right-face orientations in either emotional intnesity.

There was a significant difference (T(17) = 2.613 P=.018) in the subjective emotional intensity rating of the normal picture as compared to the left and right face orientations in both emotional states and both intensities.

DISCUSSION

The results from this experiment did not concur with any portion of our hypothesis or the results from previous studies. We theorized that as the emotional intensity of the pictures increased, the difference between the left-faced and right-faced pictures would increase with the left-faced pictures being more intense. Our results showed no differences in these factors. Also these results disagreed wth other previous studies (Sackheim, Gur, Saucy 1978), (Ladavas, 1982) that show right-hemispheric dominance of emotion. The results in this study may have been effected by the handedness of the subjects involved. The procedure did not control for the handedness of the subjects. Thompson (1985) has shown that handedness may affect how a person conceptualizes emotion in the brain.

REFERNCES