Abstract

Researchers supporting the theory of constructed emotion have focused on the role of emotion labels in the construction of emotional meaning from facial muscle movements. The label-feedback hypothesis proposed by Lupyan provided a theoretical basis for explaining the top-down influence of emotion labels. This study aimed to investigate the presence of the emotion label advantage effect in facial emotion judgment by adapting the procedure used by Lupyan and Thompson-Schill (2012) in object recognition. Participants performed a task to judge whether the emotions of the auditory cues and the subsequently presented facial expressions matched, with the auditory cues manipulated to be emotion labels, emotional vocalizations, or emotional action labels. To verify whether the label advantage effect persists across different inter-stimulus intervals (ISIs) between the cue and target, following the design of Lupyan & Thompson-Schill (2012), ISIs were set at 400ms, 1000ms, and 1500ms as a between-subject variable. The responses were analyzed using signal detection theory. The results showed that emotion labels yielded the highest sensitivity in emotion judgments compared to the other two types of cues. Moreover, this label advantage effect was observed regardless of the time given for cue processing, namely, ISIs. These findings suggest that emotion labels, compared to nonverbal cues like emotional vocalizations or other verbal cues like emotional action labels, effectively activate the conceptual representations required for categorization, thereby facilitating more accurate emotion category judgments in facial expressions. The results of this study can be interpreted as experimental evidence supporting the theory of constructed emotion asserting the unique role of emotion labels in emotion perception based on the label-feedback hypothesis.