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How Mood States Affect Information

Processing During Facial Emotion Recognition:
An Eye Tracking Study

ARTICLE in SWISS JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGY · DECEMBER 2011

Impact Factor: 0.57 · DOI: 10.1024/1421-0185/a000060

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 Swiss Journal of Psychology, 70 (4), 2011, 223–231

Sw issJ. P.Psychol.
C. Schmid et ©
70 (4) al.:2011
HowbyMoods
Verlag Affect Information
Hans Huber, HogrefeProcessing
AG, Bern

Original Communication

How Mood States Affect Information

Processing During Facial Emotion
Recognition: An Eye Tracking Study
Petra C. Schmid1, Marianne Schmid Mast1, Dario Bombari2,
Fred W. Mast2, and Janek S. Lobmaier2
1
Department of Work and Organizational Psychology, University of Neuchatel, Switzerland
2
Department of Psychology, University of Bern, Switzerland

Abstract. Existing research shows that a sad mood hinders emotion recognition. More generally, it has been shown that mood affects
information processing. A happy mood facilitates global processing and a sad mood boosts local processing. Global processing has been
described as the Gestalt-like integration of details; local processing is understood as the detailed processing of the parts. The present
study investigated how mood affects the use of information processing styles in an emotion recognition task. Thirty-three participants
were primed with happy or sad moods in a within-subjects design. They performed an emotion recognition task during which eye
movements were registered. Eye movements served to provide information about participants’ global or local information processing
style. Our results suggest that when participants were in a happy mood, they processed information more globally compared to when
they were in a sad mood. However, global processing was only positively and local processing only negatively related to emotion
recognition when participants were in a sad mood. When they were in a happy mood, processing style was not related to emotion
recognition performance. Our findings clarify the mechanism that underlies accurate emotion recognition, which is important when one
is aiming to improve this ability (i.e., via training).

Keywords: emotion recognition, information processing, mood, gender

Introduction expressions. Sad, compared to happy, people tend to per-

Facial emotional expressions are important cues in social
communication. Facial expressions coordinate social inter-
actions by providing information about the sender’s emo-
tional and intentional states and/or the nature of the rela-
tionship between the two interaction partners. Although the
ability to correctly recognize other people’s emotions is
crucial to experience positive social interactions (Keltner
& Kring, 1998), the mechanism underlying accurate emo-
tion recognition is still unclear. We know that, in general,
people reliably recognize emotions from faces, yet this
ability seems to vary between individuals (Herba & Phil-
lips, 2004; Moore, 2001).
A large body of research reports that people suffering
from affective disorders such as depression or mania show
decreased emotion recognition accuracy (e.g., Bouhuys,
Geerts, & Gordijn, 1999; Heimberg, Gur, Erwin, Shtasel,
& Gur, 1992; Lembke & Ketter, 2002; Surguladze et al.,
2004; Zuroff & Colussy, 1986). Not only affective disor-
ders, but also normal variations in mood states in healthy
people have consequences for the perception of emotional
ceive more sadness and less happiness in faces (Bouhuys,
Bloem, & Groothuis, 1995; Niedenthal, Halberstadt, Mar-
golin, & Innes-Ker, 2000). Such mood-congruity effects
have also been reported for emotion recognition accuracy:
Sad people showed a decrease in recognition accuracy for
happy emotions, whereas happy people showed a decrease
in recognition accuracy for sad emotions (Schmid &
Schmid Mast, 2010). Schmid and Schmid Mast’s stimulus
material only included happy and sad facial expressions.
Chepenik and colleagues (Chepenik, Cornew, & Farah,
2007) used stimulus material consisting of neutral, happy,
sad, angry, and fearful facial expressions. They found that
a sad mood compared to a neutral mood had a detrimental
effect on overall emotion recognition accuracy (no mood-
congruity effects). Because there was no happy mood con-
dition in the Chepenik et al. (2007) study, we do not know
how a happy mood influences emotion recognition accu-
racy when more than two emotional expressions are in-
cluded. Moreover, the mechanism underlying how mood
affects emotion recognition accuracy remains poorly un-
derstood. Our goal was to obtain a more refined under-

DOI 10.1024/1421-0185/a000060 Swiss J. Psychol. 70 (4) © 2011 by Verlag Hans Huber, Hogrefe AG, Bern
224 P. C. Schmid et al.: How Moods Affect Information Processing
standing of how correct emotion recognition works. In the
present paper, we test the assumption that emotion recog-
nition accuracy depends on the use of global versus local
information processing styles and that people in a happy
or a sad mood use different information processing styles.
Previous studies have reported that women usually out-
perform men in emotion recognition tasks (McClure,
2000, for a meta-analysis). Here, we test the assumption
that this gender difference may be explained by different
processing styles. These predictions will be outlined in the
next sections.
Information Processing During Emotion
Recognition
Previous research suggests that when people are recogniz-
ing emotions, they process faces globally rather than local-
ly, meaning that the face is more likely to be processed as
a whole and not in a piecemeal fashion. Calder, Young,
Keane, and Dean (2000) cut faces expressing different
emotions in two halves. The cut was done horizontally be-
low the eyes, dividing the face into an upper and lower part.
The upper part of one face was then combined with a lower
part of another face in such a manner that the upper and the
lower face part contained different emotional expressions.
The upper and lower parts were either aligned so that the
whole represented a new, intact face (composite), or the
two face parts were presented shifted apart on the horizon-
tal axis (noncomposite). Participants were instructed to ei-
ther focus on the upper or the lower part of the composite
or noncomposite faces and to name the emotion expressed
in the respective face part (the other face part was to be
ignored). Participants took longer to recognize the emo-
tions when the faces were composite than when they were
noncomposite. The authors concluded that participants
were slower in the composite condition because they pro-
cessed the relevant and irrelevant parts as a whole, and the
irrelevant part, thus, interfered with the recognition of the
emotion in the relevant half. This finding can be seen as
evidence of a global information processing style when rec-
ognizing emotions.
Further support for the assumption that a global infor-
mation processing style is important for emotion recogni-
tion comes from studies on the face inversion effect.
Prkachin (2003) showed that emotional expressions were
more difficult to recognize when the faces were inverted
than when the faces were upright. Given that several stud-
ies have shown that inverting a face hampers configural
processing (e.g., Freire, Lee, & Symons, 2000; Searcy &
Bartlett, 1996; Yin, 1969), inverted facial expression of
emotions might have been recognized less easily because
configural – or global – processing was not possible. Sear-
cy and Bartlett (1996) argued that configural information
is comparable to global information, as configural infor-
mation refers to spatiorelational information in faces, such
Swiss J. Psychol. 70 (4) © 2011 by Verlag Hans Huber, Hogrefe AG, Bern
as the intereye distance or the distance between the nose
and the mouth. Similar to global processing, perceiving
configural information allows one to recognize large co-
herent units or global forms (Brosnan, Scott, Fox, & Pye,
2004). The face inversion effect found in emotion recog-
nition, therefore, supports the idea that a global processing
style aids emotion recognition.
It is possible that one processing style may be more ap-
propriate than the other for one emotion, but not for anoth-
er. McKelvie (1995) found that the recognition of anger,
disgust, surprise, sadness, and fear was hindered when the
faces were inverted. Only recognition of happiness was not
affected by face inversion. Prkachin (2003) showed that the
recognition of anger, disgust, and fear was more affected
by face inversion than the recognition of happiness, sad-
ness, and surprise. Configural information might, there-
fore, play an important role in the recognition of most emo-
tions. Happiness seems to be an exception, as it was still
recognized accurately after configural or global informa-
tion had been reduced. An explanation for this might be
that happy faces are generally easier to recognize than other
emotions and that very little information is needed for rec-
ognition (happy face advantage; e.g., Leppänen & Hieta-
nen, 2004). Indeed, detecting a smiling mouth may suffice
to recognize happiness.
Mood Effects on Information Processing
The affect-as-information theory (Clore et al., 2001;
Schwarz, 1990) suggests that people in a sad mood process
information more deliberately and search for specific in-
formation before making a judgment. People in a happy
mood use a more automatic or heuristic information pro-
cessing style and judgments are made on the basis of an
overall impression. This theory is supported by empirical
findings (De Vries, Holland, & Witteman, 2008; Forgas,
1992). Gasper and Clore (2002) assumed that a differential
use of information processing styles has consequences for
global versus local processing of visual stimuli. The au-
thors asked happy and sad participants to perform the glob-
al-local focus test introduced by Kimchi and Palmer
(1982). This test contains hierarchical figures consisting of
small triangles or squares (local attributes) forming a larger
triangle or square (global attribute). A standard figure was
presented simultaneously with two other figures. In one of
these figures, the global attribute was the same as the stand-
ard figure and, in the other figure, the local attribute was
the same as the standard figure. The task was to indicate
which of the two figures was more similar to the standard
figure. Results showed that sad people were more likely to
rely on the local attributes (and, consequently, less likely
to rely on the global attributes) than happy people. This
finding is consistent with the idea that a happy mood trig-
gers global information processing whereas a sad mood
triggers local information processing.
 P. C. Schmid et al.: How Moods Affect Information Processing
Gender Effects
Women typically outperform men in emotion recognition
accuracy (McClure, 2000; for a meta-analysis). Moreover,
there is evidence that men and women process information
differently when recognizing emotions. Hall, Witelson,
Szechtman, and Nahmias (2003) investigated the brain ac-
tivation of men and women during emotion recognition.
They found less limbic activity and greater left hemispheric
frontal cortical activity in men than in women. According
to Damasio (1994) and Ledoux (2000), the limbic system
is associated with reactions to primary emotions (fast and
innate reaction to threatening stimuli) while prefrontal ac-
tivation is associated with reactions to secondary emotions
(learned and controlled reactions). Referring to these find-
ings, Hall et al. argued that men use a less automatic and
more analytic information processing style than women
when recognizing emotions. Because automatic processing
is triggered by global processing and analytic processing
by local processing (Förster & Dannenberg, 2010), one
might conclude that men generally tend to engage more in
item-specific (local) processing and women more in rela-
tional (global) processing (e.g., Gilligan, 1982; Putrevu,
2001). Hence, women might outperform men in emotion
recognition because they use a (global) processing style
that is beneficial for correct emotion recognition whereas
men use a less advantageous (local) processing style.
The Present Study
In the present paper, we examine whether the use of global
versus local information processing styles influences the
accuracy of emotion recognition and whether the relation-
ship between processing style and accurate emotion recog-
nition depends on the perceiver’s mood and gender. Eye
tracking measures were used to assess participants’ infor-
mation processing styles. We analyzed whether a global
eye scan pattern (enabling an integrative, holistic impres-
sion of the face) or a local eye scan pattern (allowing a
deeper analysis of the detailed facial information, such as
the eyes, the mouth, and the nose) is more beneficial for
accurate emotion recognition. The following predictions
were tested: Consistent with the literature stressing the role
of global processing in emotion recognition (Calder et al.,
2000; Prkachin, 2003), we predicted that the more global
the processing style, the better the emotion recognition per-
formance (Hypothesis 1a). Conversely, the more local the
processing style, the worse the performance on the emotion
recognition task would be (Hypothesis 1b). Further, we ex-
pected participants in a happy mood to use a more global
processing style (Hypothesis 2a) and a less local processing
style (Hypothesis 2b) than participants in a sad mood (e.g.,
De Vries et al., 2008; Gasper & Clore, 2002; Schwarz,
1990). Because we hypothesized that participants in a hap-
py mood use the more beneficial, global processing style
Swiss J. Psychol. 70 (4) © 2011 by Verlag Hans Huber, Hogrefe AG, Bern
225
(e.g., Gasper & Clore, 2002), we predicted that participants
in a happy mood would be more accurate than those in a
sad mood (Hypothesis 3). Based on the meta-analysis by
McClure (2000), we hypothesized that women would rec-
ognize emotions more accurately than men (Hypothesis 4).
If the mechanism explaining the gender difference in emo-
tion recognition indeed lies in different information pro-
cessing styles of women and men (Hall et al., 2003), we
would expect women to process information more globally
(Hypothesis 5a) and less locally (Hypothesis 5b) than men.
Finally, we tested whether there were differences between
the different emotional expressions without putting for-
ward hypotheses, because of the lack of consistency in em-
pirical findings (McKelvie, 1995; Prkachin, 2003).
Method
Participants
Participants were 34 university students (15 males, 19 fe-
males). One male participant did not come back for the
second testing session and was excluded from the analyses.
Because of calibration problems we had to remove four
female participants from the analyses on the eye tracking
measures, resulting in N = 29 (14 male, 15 female) partic-
ipants. All participants were native French speakers re-
cruited at the University of Lausanne (Mage = 23.18, SD =
3.43). They were remunerated with 30 Swiss francs. All
participants reported normal or corrected-to-normal vision
and were right-handed.
Stimuli and Materials
Mood Priming
Happy and sad moods were primed with short film scenes.
A meta-analysis showed that film scenes are the most ef-
fective and ethically sound way of priming mood (Wester-
mann, Spies, Stahl, & Hesse, 1996). Happy mood was
primed with a scene from the movie “When Harry Met
Sally” in which the actress simulates an orgasm. Sad mood
was primed with a scene from the movie “The Champ” in
which a little boy cries at his father’s deathbed. As the par-
ticipants were French speaking, we presented the French
versions of these film scenes, which have also been shown
to effectively prime mood states (Schaefer, Nils, Sanchez,
& Phillippot, 2010). The film scenes were chosen based on
the validation and recommendation of Rottenberg, Ray,
and Gross (2007) and both scenes were 2.46 min long.
Emotional Faces
We used stimuli from the DANVA 2-AF (Nowicki & Duke,
1994) and the Ekman and Friesen (1976) series. The
226 P. C. Schmid et al.: How Moods Affect Information Processing
Figure 1. A selection of the modified stimuli used in the
emotion recognition task (left: fearful expression; right:
happy expression).
DANVA consists of 24 pictures of emotional facial expres-
sions: happiness, fear, anger, and sadness. These 24 stimuli
were combined with 40 stimuli from the Ekman and Frie-
sen series of basic emotions expressing the same four emo-
tions. The stimulus sets were divided into two subsets (one
for each of the two testing sessions). Each subset consisted
of 12 stimuli from the DANVA and 20 stimuli from the
Ekman and Friesen series containing equal numbers of pic-
tures of each emotion. The pictures were 14 × 21 cm in size,
so the visual angle subtended approximately 13 ° × 20 °.
Because we were only interested in participants’ eye scan
patterns while they were looking at a face, we removed
irrelevant features such as hair and clothing from the stim-
ulus faces. The modified pictures consisted of a standard-
ized oval shape containing only the face (see Figure 1).
Eye Tracking
To register eye movements we used a Hi-Speed 1250 track-
ing system, SMI-SensoMotoric Instruments (Teltow, Ger-
many). Only the left eye was recorded, with a sampling rate
of 1250 Hz and a spatial resolution of 0.01. We only ana-
lyzed eye movements that were performed before the re-
sponse to the facial expression was given and only eye data
of correctly recognized emotions were analyzed. We de-
fined regions of interest for four face features: the left eye,
the right eye, the nose, and the mouth. We used two com-
plementary eye tracking measures – interfeatural saccade
ratio and feature gaze duration – that have previously been
used to identify global and local scan patterns when pro-
cessing faces (Bombari, Mast, & Lobmaier, 2009). Sac-
cades that were performed between two regions of interest
are referred to as interfeatural saccades; the durations of
fixations performed within the regions of interest were add-
ed up and are referred to as feature gaze duration.
Task and Procedure
Participants were tested in two sessions on different days
(1–2 days apart). On arrival at the first session, participants
gave their informed consent. At the beginning of the first
session, participants were familiarized with the four re-
Swiss J. Psychol. 70 (4) © 2011 by Verlag Hans Huber, Hogrefe AG, Bern
sponse keys (happy, sad, angry, and fearful) for the emotion
recognition task. The participants learned the sequence of
the keys by heart so that they would not have to look down
at the keys during eye tracking. They were then assigned
to one of two mood primings, happy or sad. Happy and sad
mood priming were both achieved by showing the partici-
pants fragments of films. To check whether mood priming
was successful, we asked the participants “How do you feel
at this moment?” (on a 6-point Likert scale of 1 = extremely
sad to 6 = extremely happy) after they had watched the
films. Participants then performed Part 1 of the emotion
recognition task, in which participants indicated by button
press which emotion the presented face expressed. Each
face was presented in the center of the screen for 4 s, fol-
lowed by a 5 s mask (a face shape). Participants were al-
lowed to respond during stimulus exposure or during the
mask period (the answer time frame, thus, totaled 9 s). Part
2 was presented to the participants in the second session,
in which they were primed with the alternative mood (sad,
if they saw a happy film in Session 1 and happy, if they
saw a sad film in Session 1). Participants’ key presses and
eye movements were recorded in both sessions.
Statistical Analyses
Accuracy
Participants’ emotion recognition accuracy for the two test
sets was assessed using a nonparametric measure of dis-
criminability (A’). We used the formula suggested by
Snodgrass, Levy-Berger, and Haydon (1985): A’ = 1/2 +
[(pHit –pFA)*(1 + pHit-pFA)]/[4pHit*(1-pFA)], in which
pHit refers to the proportion of hits and pFA to the propor-
tion of false alarms. Values range from 0 to 1, with a value
of 0.5 indicating chance performance.
Eye Movements
Interfeatural Saccade Ratio
We calculated a ratio comparing the amount of interfeatural
saccades divided by the total number of saccades per-
formed (in order to correct for the varying exposure times
that result from the different reaction times). The higher the
score on this ratio, the more global the information process-
ing style is (i.e., the more information is integrated to form
an overall impression).
Feature Gaze Duration
Feature gaze duration refers to the mean time spent looking
at the features. Consecutive fixations that were performed
within the same feature were first summed up, and then the
mean was calculated over all features. Fixations that were
 P. C. Schmid et al.: How Moods Affect Information Processing
Table 1
Means (standard deviations) for men’s and women’s emotion recognition sensitivity A’, interfeatural saccade ratio, and
feature gaze duration in happy and sad moods
Mood Happy
Sex Men Women
Sensitivity A’ .894 (.053)
Interfeatural saccades .339 (.214)
Feature gaze duration 602.32 (444.45) 357.05 (62.21)
shorter than 100 ms were not taken into account. Longer
feature gaze duration indicates more local processing.
To test for relations between information processing and
emotion recognition accuracy (Hypothesis 1), we comput-
ed correlations between the interfeatural saccade ratio, fea-
ture gaze duration, and sensitivity A’. We further calculated
mixed model ANCOVAs with gender as the between-sub-
jects factor and mood priming (happy vs. sad mood) as the
within-subjects factor, and with either the interfeatural sac-
cade ratio (global processing), feature gaze duration (local
processing), or sensitivity A’ (emotion recognition accura-
cy) as the dependent variable (Hypotheses 2–5). Mood
priming order and test part order were entered as covariates
in the analyses.
To test for differential effects on the four facial expres-
sions, we separately calculated three 2 (Mood Priming:
happy vs. sad) × 2 (Gender) × 4 (Facial Expression: hap-
piness, sadness, anger, fear) mixed model ANCOVAs for
sensitivity (A’), feature gaze duration, and the interfeatur-
al saccade ratio as the dependent variables. Mood priming
order and test part order were again entered as covariates
in the analyses. Correlations of sensitivity (A’) with
feature gaze duration and interfeatural saccade ratio
were also calculated separately for each of the four
stimulus emotions for participants in a happy and a sad
mood.
Results
Table 1 presents the means and standard deviations of emo-
tion recognition accuracy, interfeatural saccade ratio, and
feature gaze duration for men and women separately and
for happy and sad mood separately. The overall emotion
recognition accuracy A’ was .90 (SD = .04).
Manipulation Checks
One-sample t-tests against 3.5 (neutral mood) showed that
we successfully manipulated participants’ mood. Partici-
pants felt happy after happy mood priming (M = 4.35), t(30)
= 8.64, p < .001, and sad after sad mood priming (M = 3.06),
t(32) = 3.83, p = .001.
227
Sad
Men Women
.907 (.049) .872 (.047) .914 (.032)
.458 (.143) .364 (.190) 417 (.202)
621.86 (482.63) 367.88 (68.74)
Relation Between Information Processing
Styles and Emotion Recognition Accuracy
The interfeatural saccade ratio (global processing) correlated
positively with sensitivity A’ (emotion recognition accuracy)
when participants were primed with a sad mood, r(29) = .41,
p = .03, but not when they were primed with a happy mood,
r(29) = .17, p = .39. Longer feature gaze duration (local pro-
cessing) was related to decreased Sensitivity A’, r(29) = –.44,
p = .02, when participants were primed with a sad mood.
However, no relation was found for participants primed with
a happy mood, r(29) = .09, p = .66. Note that there were
negative correlations between interfeatural saccade ratio and
feature gaze duration for happy mood, r(29) = –.50, p < .01,
and for sad mood, r(29) = –.57, p < .01.
Mood Effects
Mood priming had no effect on sensitivity A’, F(1, 29) =
0.99, p = .32, but there was a significant main effect of
mood priming on the interfeatural saccade ratio (global
processing), F(1, 25) = 6.41, p = .02, indicating that happy
mood priming resulted in more global processing (M = .40)
compared to sad mood priming (M = .39). Mood priming
had no effect on feature gaze duration (local processing),
F(1, 25) = 0.02, p = .89.
Gender Effects
The main effect of gender for sensitivity A’ showed that
women performed better than men (M = .91 for women and
M = .88 for men), F(1, 29) = 3.90, p = .05. A trend was
found for the interfeatural saccade ratio, F(1, 25) = 3.09, p
= .09, showing that women tended to process information
more globally (M = .45) than men (M = .34). Moreover,
gender significantly affected feature gaze duration,
F(1, 25) = 7.99, p < .01; women processed information less
locally (M = 320.40) than men (M = 657.20).
Mood × Gender Interactions
We found a significant mood priming by gender interaction
for sensitivity A’, F(1, 29) = 3.85, p = .05. Men recognized
Swiss J. Psychol. 70 (4) © 2011 by Verlag Hans Huber, Hogrefe AG, Bern
228 P. C. Schmid et al.: How Moods Affect Information Processing
emotions better when they were in a happy mood (M = .90)
than when in a sad mood (M = .87), t(13) = 1.82, p = .09.
Women’s mood did not affect their emotion recognition ac-
curacy (M = .91 when they were in a happy mood and M
= .91 when in a sad mood), t(18) = .624, p = .54. The in-
teractions between interfeatural saccade ratio and feature
gaze duration were not significant, Fs < 0.11, ps > .74.
Facial Expression-Specific Analyses
No significant facial expression-specific mood priming or
gender effects were found on the three dependent variables
(sensitivity A’, interfeatural saccade ratio, feature gaze du-
ration), all Fs < 2.54, all ps > .06. Feature gaze duration
correlated negatively with sensitivity A’ for fearful faces
when participants were in a sad mood, r(29) = –.48, p =
.01. Shorter feature gaze duration was, therefore, related to
better recognition accuracy for fearful faces when partici-
pants were primed with a sad mood. The interfeatural sac-
cade ratio was negatively related to sensitivity A’ for happy
faces when participants were in a happy mood, r(29) =
–.36, p = .05, meaning that the fewer interfeatural saccades
participants in a happy mood performed, the better they
recognized the happy emotions. None of the other correla-
tions were significant (all ps > .13).
Effects of Covariates
The only significant effects for the covariates were an in-
teraction of mood priming by mood priming order for the
interfeatural saccade ratio, F(1, 25) = 10.53, p = .003, and
a mood priming order main effect for feature gaze duration,
F(1, 25) = 4.62, p = .041.
Discussion
In this study, we investigated whether mood states, gender,
and information processing styles influence emotion rec-
ognition accuracy. We expected a positive correlation be-
tween global information processing and emotion recogni-
tion accuracy and a negative correlation between local pro-
cessing and emotion recognition accuracy (Hypotheses 1a
and 1b). These hypotheses were only confirmed for the sad
but not for the happy mood priming condition. As expected,
a happy mood resulted in more global information process-
ing than a sad mood (Hypothesis 2a). However, contrary to
our expectation, a happy mood did not entail less local pro-
cessing than a sad mood (Hypothesis 2b). We had predicted
that participants would recognize emotions more accurate-
ly when in a happy mood than a sad mood (Hypothesis 3),
and our results confirmed this hypothesis for men but not
for women. As expected, we found that women outper-
formed men on the emotion recognition task (Hypothesis
Swiss J. Psychol. 70 (4) © 2011 by Verlag Hans Huber, Hogrefe AG, Bern
4). In line with our expectations, women tended to process
information more globally (Hypotheses 5a) and processed
information significantly less locally than men (Hypothe-
ses 5b).
We showed that a global information processing style is
more favorable for emotion recognition than a local infor-
mation processing style. However, this link could only be
found when participants were primed with a sad mood, but
not when they were primed with a happy mood. Existing
research on the composite effect of emotion recognition has
shown that global face information is difficult to ignore
(Calder et al., 2000). Research on the face inversion effect
suggests that hindering global information processing de-
creases emotion recognition accuracy (Prkachin, 2003).
Our study further supports the assumption that global in-
formation processing is important for emotion recognition
by using an eye tracking method. Unlike Calder et al.
(2000) and Prkachin (2003), we did not manipulate the in-
formation in the faces, but looked at whether participants’
eye scan pattern was related to accuracy. Using upright,
nonmanipulated faces as stimuli is a strength of our study
as it provides more ecological validity.
We believe that global processing was beneficial for
emotion recognition only when participants were sad and
not when they were happy because happy people, in gen-
eral, engage in more global processing (Gasper & Clore,
2002). Therefore, if our happy-mood-priming primed par-
ticipants to use a global processing style, then we might
have produced a ceiling effect, explaining the lack of a cor-
relation between global processing and accuracy when par-
ticipants were happy. Note that we did, indeed, find that
participants processed more globally after being primed
with a happy mood compared to after being primed with a
sad mood. It is already well-established that a happy mood
triggers global and automatic and a sad mood local and
analytic processing styles in different domains (Bless et al.,
1996; De Vries et al., 2008; Gasper & Clore, 2002). More-
over, it has often been argued that information processing
style is responsible for the effects of sad or depressed mood
on emotion recognition and interpersonal judgments in
general (Ambady & Gray, 2002; Chepenik et al., 2007; For-
gas, 1992). An alternative explanation for the lack of sig-
nificant findings for the happy mood condition might be
that the happy mood manipulation was less strong than the
sad mood manipulation. Some mood induction procedures
are known to produce mood effects that differ in strength;
however, this is usually not the case for the priming method
we used, which employs happy and sad mood film scenes
(for a review, see Gerrards-Hesse, Spies, & Hesse, 1994;
or also Gross & Levenson, 1995).
We failed to show a direct link between mood and emo-
tion recognition accuracy in the present study. Previous
studies either found mood-congruity effects or decreased
emotion recognition accuracy for people in a sad mood.
What might account for our nonsignificant finding? Be-
cause we used a wider range of facial expressions (happy,
sad, fearful, and angry expressions) than previous studies,
 P. C. Schmid et al.: How Moods Affect Information Processing
we may have washed out specific effects. For example,
Schmid and Schmid Mast (2010), who found mood-con-
gruity effects, only included sad and happy facial expres-
sions as stimuli. Chepenik et al. (2007) used a stimulus set
similar to the one used in the present study and found that
a sad mood decreased emotion recognition compared to a
neutral mood condition. However, the happy mood was not
manipulated in the Chepenik et al. study and it is possible
that both happy and sad moods have detrimental effects on
emotion recognition accuracy.
One limitation of the present study is the lack of a con-
trol group in neutral mood; we cannot, therefore, speculate
whether both happy and sad moods affected performance
negatively. But we can speculate why participants did not
perform better when in a happy mood (when they pro-
cessed more globally, as shown by us) than when in a sad
mood. Detrimental effects of mood on task performance
have often been explained with the cognitive load theory
(Sweller, 1988): The experience of emotions (positive and
negative) might impose cognitive load and affect working
memory (Um, Song, & Plass, 2007). For example, Weg-
ner, Erber, and Zanakos (1993) showed that regulation of
mood states after positive and negative mood priming re-
quires cognitive resources that cannot be invested in other
tasks. Cognitive load is known to decrease emotion rec-
ognition accuracy (Phillips, Channon, Tunstall, Heden-
strom, & Lyons, 2008). In our experiment, happy partici-
pants performed more global eye movements and, there-
fore, gained more reliable information than participants in
a sad mood, but if cognitive load was high (because par-
ticipants were regulating their mood), perhaps they were
not able to take advantage of this information.
In addition to the mood effects on information process-
ing, we predicted that gender would affect information
processing. In line with the literature (McClure, 2000),
women outperformed men in our task. Previous research
has shown that men and women differ in brain activation
during emotion recognition, suggesting that they use dif-
ferent processing styles (Hall et al., 2003). However, no
study has yet examined whether men and women differ in
the way they look at the stimulus. We showed that women
look at faces in a different way using a more global pattern
of scanning. This suggests that gender differences in in-
formation processing not only appear in brain data, but
also on a behavioral level when participants are scanning
the faces.
The present study helps us to better understand the
mechanisms underlying accurate emotion recognition.
The ability to recognize other people’s emotions is impor-
tant for personal and professional success and well-being
(Byron, Terranova, & Nowicki, 2007; Carton, Kessler, &
Pape, 1999). Thus, the current findings have important ap-
plied implications. Understanding the mechanism and
moderating factors of correct emotion recognition can
help us design effective training techniques aimed at im-
proving emotion recognition skills.
Swiss J. Psychol. 70 (4) © 2011 by Verlag Hans Huber, Hogrefe AG, Bern
229
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