Title: Exploring perception and categorization of social and affective stimuli
Description: We constantly perceive and categorize internal signals, like our subjective affective state, and complex social signals, like the faces of the people around us. In this dissertation, I aim to characterize some of the ways in which we perceive and categorize affective and social stimuli, top-down influences on those processes, and individual differences in social & affective perception/categorization. First, in Chapter 2, I apply psychophysical methods to assess how individual differences in trait emotional expressivity arise from observers' subjective emotion reporting thresholds. Next, in Chapter 3, I characterize the perception and categorization of age from adult faces. Finally, in Chapter 4, I investigate whether the act of categorizing one's subjective emotional state changes the affective distance between neural representations of positive and negative affect states.