Autosuggestion and Mental Imagery Bias the Perception of Social Emotions
Cognitive processes that modulate social emotion perception are of pivotal interest for psychological and clinical research. Autosuggestion and mental imagery are two candidate processes for such a modulation, however, their precise effect on social emotion perception has not yet been clarified. Here, we investigated if autosuggestion and mental imagery during an adaptation period influence the perception of subsequent facial emotions, and if so, to which extent. Separate cohorts of participants took part in five experiments, where they either mentally affirmed (autosuggested, Experiments 1a and 1b) or imagined (Experiment 2) that a neutral face would be expressing a specific emotion (happy or sad). Subsequent facial emotion perception was then assessed by calculating points of subjective equality (PSEs) along a happiness-sadness continuum. Our results show that both autosuggestion and mental imagery induce a bias toward perceiving facial emotions in the direction of the desired emotion, with larger Bayes factors supporting autosuggestion. Experiment 3 confirmed no effects when emotional words were presented instead, suggesting a reduced role of response bias to drive this effect. Finally, experiment 4 validated the experimental setup by demonstrating standard contrastive aftereffects when participants are adapted to actual, physical emotional faces. Together, our findings provide an initial step toward understanding the potential of intentional cognitive processes to modulate social emotions, specifically by biasing emotional face perception. With comparable effect sizes observed for both autosuggestion and mental imagery, these strategies appear promising as tools for self-directed interventions.