Tears make you look sadder even when you are scowling or smiling : exploring the sadness enhancement effect of emotional tears

Emotional tears on crying faces have been reliably shown to enhance the perception of sadness. I aimed to address in this dissertation some of the research gaps regarding the emotion perception of tears, including the effect of tears on the perception of non-sadness emotions, the automaticity and hi...

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Main Author: Ong, Chew Wei
Other Authors: Kenichi Ito
Format: Thesis-Doctor of Philosophy
Language:English
Published: Nanyang Technological University 2021
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Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10356/150682
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Institution: Nanyang Technological University
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spelling sg-ntu-dr.10356-1506822023-03-05T15:53:40Z Tears make you look sadder even when you are scowling or smiling : exploring the sadness enhancement effect of emotional tears Ong, Chew Wei Kenichi Ito School of Social Sciences KIto@ntu.edu.sg Social sciences::Psychology::Affection and emotion Emotional tears on crying faces have been reliably shown to enhance the perception of sadness. I aimed to address in this dissertation some of the research gaps regarding the emotion perception of tears, including the effect of tears on the perception of non-sadness emotions, the automaticity and high efficiency in perceiving tears, and the contextual influence on the sadness enhancement effect of tears. Studies 1a and 1b used self-report measures of perceived emotions and found that the addition of tears consistently made the facial expressions look sadder but did not have a consistent impact on the perception of other emotions (i.e., anger, disgust, fear, surprise, and happiness). This sadness enhancement effect of tears can also occur automatically. Using the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald et al., 1998), Studies 2a and 2b showed that participants displayed a strong tendency to associate tears with sadness and negative affect efficiently with little or no control. Studies 3a and 3b found no evidence that the presence of contextual information could serve as a boundary condition for the sadness enhancement effect of tears, but instead further demonstrated the robustness of the effect of tears. Even when the tearful expressions were presented along with an additional context (i.e., a body posture or an emotional scene), participants reported perceiving the tearful expressions as sadder than the tearless ones. Gender and cultural differences in the effect of tears were not found. As a whole, this dissertation demonstrated that emotional tears were consistently perceived as an indication of sadness and offered directions in further exploring the effect of tears on emotion perception. Doctor of Philosophy 2021-06-23T04:34:26Z 2021-06-23T04:34:26Z 2020 Thesis-Doctor of Philosophy Ong, C. W. (2020). Tears make you look sadder even when you are scowling or smiling : exploring the sadness enhancement effect of emotional tears. Doctoral thesis, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. https://hdl.handle.net/10356/150682 https://hdl.handle.net/10356/150682 10.32657/10356/150682 en This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). application/pdf Nanyang Technological University
institution Nanyang Technological University
building NTU Library
continent Asia
country Singapore
Singapore
content_provider NTU Library
collection DR-NTU
language English
topic Social sciences::Psychology::Affection and emotion
spellingShingle Social sciences::Psychology::Affection and emotion
Ong, Chew Wei
Tears make you look sadder even when you are scowling or smiling : exploring the sadness enhancement effect of emotional tears
description Emotional tears on crying faces have been reliably shown to enhance the perception of sadness. I aimed to address in this dissertation some of the research gaps regarding the emotion perception of tears, including the effect of tears on the perception of non-sadness emotions, the automaticity and high efficiency in perceiving tears, and the contextual influence on the sadness enhancement effect of tears. Studies 1a and 1b used self-report measures of perceived emotions and found that the addition of tears consistently made the facial expressions look sadder but did not have a consistent impact on the perception of other emotions (i.e., anger, disgust, fear, surprise, and happiness). This sadness enhancement effect of tears can also occur automatically. Using the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald et al., 1998), Studies 2a and 2b showed that participants displayed a strong tendency to associate tears with sadness and negative affect efficiently with little or no control. Studies 3a and 3b found no evidence that the presence of contextual information could serve as a boundary condition for the sadness enhancement effect of tears, but instead further demonstrated the robustness of the effect of tears. Even when the tearful expressions were presented along with an additional context (i.e., a body posture or an emotional scene), participants reported perceiving the tearful expressions as sadder than the tearless ones. Gender and cultural differences in the effect of tears were not found. As a whole, this dissertation demonstrated that emotional tears were consistently perceived as an indication of sadness and offered directions in further exploring the effect of tears on emotion perception.
author2 Kenichi Ito
author_facet Kenichi Ito
Ong, Chew Wei
format Thesis-Doctor of Philosophy
author Ong, Chew Wei
author_sort Ong, Chew Wei
title Tears make you look sadder even when you are scowling or smiling : exploring the sadness enhancement effect of emotional tears
title_short Tears make you look sadder even when you are scowling or smiling : exploring the sadness enhancement effect of emotional tears
title_full Tears make you look sadder even when you are scowling or smiling : exploring the sadness enhancement effect of emotional tears
title_fullStr Tears make you look sadder even when you are scowling or smiling : exploring the sadness enhancement effect of emotional tears
title_full_unstemmed Tears make you look sadder even when you are scowling or smiling : exploring the sadness enhancement effect of emotional tears
title_sort tears make you look sadder even when you are scowling or smiling : exploring the sadness enhancement effect of emotional tears
publisher Nanyang Technological University
publishDate 2021
url https://hdl.handle.net/10356/150682
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