I know how you feel: Task-irrelevant facial expressions are spontaneously processed at a semantic level

54 In social interactions, people infer others’ emotions from their body posture, facial expressions, and movement, to respond appropriately (Darwin, 1872/1998). Facial expressions of basic emotions are recognized particularly accurately (e.g., Ekman, Sorenson, & Friesen, 1969), and generating these expressions depends on distinct patterns of facial muscle activity (Ekman, Levenson, & Friesen, 1983) that exist across cultures (Levenson, Ekman, Heider, & Friesen, 1992) and are difficult to inhibit and falsify (Ekman, 2001). Thus, although somewhat under conscious control (Lanzetta, Cartwright-Smith, & Kleck, 1976) and affected by experience in ontogeny (Ekman, 1973; Field, Pickens, Fox, Gonzalez, & Nawrocki, 1998; Galati, Scherer, & Ricci-Bitti, 1997), facial expressions of emotion are also innate and automatic (Izard, 1994). Although consistent research on emotion processing indicates that emotions are processed automatically, generate a matching facial expression or emotional state, and influence subsequent judgments, none of these effects occur at an emotion-specific and semantic level across emotions and populations. Affective primacy, whereby subjects attribute subliminally presented emotions to subsequent neutral stimuli (Murphy & Zajonc, 1993; Niedenthal, 1990; Stapel, Koomen, & Ruys, 2002), does not occur when subjects consciously perceive the preceding face, occurs only at the level of valence, and is thought to result from processing that subverts cortical processing, going directly from the visual thalamus to the right amygdala (Bachmann & Oit, 1992; Burton et al., 2003); however, it should be noted that d amygdala activation to emotional faces can be attenuate by reduced attention, or particular subtractions (Pessoa, Japee, Sturman, & Ungerleider, 2006; Pessoa, Padmala, & Morland, 2005; Phillips et al., 2004). Facial mimicry, whereby people mimic facial expressions they perceive in others (Dimberg, Thunberg, & Elmehed, 2000), does occur with subliminal and conscious processing of the face, is emotion specific, and can produce a matching state in the observer (cf. Buck, 1980); however, these effects are not thought to involve contextualized cortical representations—indeed, subjects can achieve emotional states from t merely configuring their faces into expressions, withou any knowledge of the emotion in the expression or task (Ekman et al., 1983). Mirror neuron studies of emotion do show cortical activation of the observer’s feeling states in response to the target in both the insula (Carr, Iacoboni, Dubeau, Mazziotta, & Lenzi, 2003; Singer et d al., 2004) an somatosensory cortex (Adolphs, Damasio, Tranel, Cooper, & Damasio, 2000), but do not involve more ventral representations of long-term memories and associations. In clinical studies on “intrusive cognition,” clinical populations say (or read) the color of words more slowly if they are relevant to their disorder; these effects are emotion specific, but overly so, because they do not occur across emotions or in most nonclinical populations; instead, these effects appear due to an early attentional filter for perceiving stimuli that are either threatening or of particular survival relevance (e.g., food for a fasting individual; reviewed by Williams, Mathews, & MacLeod, 1996). I know how you feel: Task-irrelevant facial expressions are spontaneously processed at a semantic level