We review recent work demonstrating consistent context effects during emotion perception. Visual scenes, voices, bodies, other faces, cultural orientation, and even words shape how emotion is perceived in a face, calling into question the still-common assumption that the emotional state of a person is written on and can be read from the face like words on a page. Incorporating context during emotion perception appears to be routine, efficient, and, to some degree, automatic. This evidence challenges the standard view of emotion perception represented in psychology texts, in the cognitive neuroscience literature, and in the popular media and points to a necessary change in the basic paradigm used in the scientific study of emotion perception.

In the blink of an eye, people can easily see emotion in another person's face. This fact leads many to assume that emotion perception is given and proceeds independently of conceptual processes such as language. In this paper we suggest otherwise and offer the hypothesis that language functions as a context in emotion perception. We review a variety of evidence consistent with the language-ascontext view and then discuss how a linguistically relative approach to emotion perception allows for intriguing and generative questions about the extent to which language shapes the sensory processing involved in seeing emotion in another person's face.

It is widely believed that certain emotions are universally recognized in facial expressions. Recent evidence indicates that Western perceptions (e.g., scowls as anger) depend on cues to US emotion concepts embedded in experiments. Since such cues are standard feature in methods used in cross-cultural experiments, we hypothesized that evidence of universality depends on this conceptual context. In our study, participants from the US and the Himba ethnic group sorted images of posed facial expressions into piles by emotion type. Without cues to emotion concepts, Himba participants did not show the presumed “universal” pattern, whereas US participants produced a pattern with presumed universal features. With cues to emotion concepts, participants in both cultures produced sorts that were closer to the presumed “universal” pattern, although substantial cultural variation persisted. Our findings indicate that perceptions of emotion are not universal, but depend on cultural and conceptual contexts.

People believe they see emotion written on the faces of other people. In an instant, simple facial actions are transformed into information about another's emotional state. The present research examined whether a perceiver unknowingly contributes to emotion perception with emotion word knowledge. We present 2 studies that together support a role for emotion concepts in the formation of visual percepts of emotion. As predicted, we found that perceptual priming of emotional faces (e.g., a scowling face) was disrupted when the accessibility of a relevant emotion word (e.g., anger) was temporarily reduced, demonstrating that the exact same face was encoded differently when a word was accessible versus when it was not. The implications of these findings for a linguistically relative view of emotion perception are discussed.

For almost 5 decades, the scientific study of emotion has been guided by the assumption that categories such as anger, sadness, and fear cut nature at its joints. Barrett (2006a) provided a comprehensive review of the empirical evidence from the study of emotion in humans and concluded that this assumption has outlived its usefulness. Panksepp and Izard have written lengthy papers (published in this issue) containing complementary but largely nonoverlapping criticisms of Barrett (2006a). In our response, we address three of their concerns. First, we discuss the value of correlational versus experimental studies for evaluating the natural-kind model of emotion and refute the claim that the evidence offered in Barrett (2006a) was merely correlational. Second, we take up the issue of whether or not there is evidence for "coherently organized neural circuits" for natural kinds of emotions in the mammalian brain and counter the claim that Barrett (2006a) ignored crucial evidence for existence of discrete emotions as natural kinds. Third, we address Panksepp and Izard's misconceptions of an alternative view, the conceptual act model of emotion, that was briefly discussed in Barrett (2006a). Finally, we end the article with some thoughts on how to move the scientific study of emotion beyond the debate over whether or not emotions are natural kinds."It would be very surprising indeed if the brain were organized into spatially discrete units that conform to our abstract categorizations of behavior." (Valenstein, 1973, pp. 142-143) According to the National Academy of Sciences in the United States, a theory is a wellsubstantiated explanation of a phenomenon. A theory is the end point of science-it is what scientists know to be true when observations have been confirmed by repeated experimentation (National Academy of Sciences, 1998). A hypothesis, on the other hand, is a tentative statement that must be tested. Barrett (2006a) demonstrated that after a century of empirical research, the natural-kind view of emotion is not yet a theory. It remains a set of hypotheses-or what we might call a model-subject to the same rules of scientific verification as any other model of emotion. It is a fact that people experience phenomena that are called (in English) anger, sadness, and fear. It is a fact that people experience these psychological states as discrete events that are bounded in time and that people often (but not always) experience these states as psychologically distinct from one another. It is also a fact that people easily and effortlessly see anger and sadness and fear in the behaviors of other people, including babies, and in nonhuman animals. People even see these emotions in the behaviors of shapes (squares, circles, and triangles) that move in a particular relation to one another (Heider & Simmel, 1944). It is the task of science to explain these facts: to explain how the events that people experience as anger, sadness, or fear are caused and how they are entailed in the brain. It is compelling to