Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The framework of event perception suggests that people segment continuous perceptual input into discrete events by forming mental representations of ongoing activity. Prior work extending the segmentation framework to emotion perception shows that a richer emotion vocabulary is associated with segmentation of emotion events in greater agreement with the cultural ingroup. However, little is known about how labeling behaviors themselves shape the segmentation of emotion events. Here, we look at the effect of labeling on emotion segmentation. Participants were randomly assigned to simply segment videos into discrete emotion events or to segment only when an emotion label is available and to label the segmented event. We found that compared to the group that segmented without providing labels, the group that segmented with explicit labeling behaviors were less sensitive at discriminating emotion events from non-emotion events and more conservative to identify an emotion event. The results are discussed with respect to competing theoretical accounts of the impact of labeling on emotion perception and suggest that the conceptual broadening account (where labels invoke idiographic emotion representations) may best account for the findings.