Recent developments in the field of emotion.

Psychogalvanometric Investigations in Psychoses and Other Abnormal Mental States*

“…Another striking difference is the response to outside temperatures. Under ordinary conditions sweating of the palms is not influenced significantly by outside temperatures (11). Increasing the outside temperature will augment general body sweating but not palmar sweating.…”

“…palm is from five to ten times as great as that of the general body surface (11). Palmar sweating takes place continuously whereas it is intermittent on the general body surface (10).…”

“…Increasing the outside temperature will augment general body sweating but not palmar sweating. Experimentally, it can be demonstrated that palmar sweating can be evoked by mental stimuli (11). Problems in simple arithmetic will cause a distinct and measurable increase in sweat of the palms.…”

“…The physiologists are not altogether agreed upon the precise physiological factors involved in the PGR (13,15), though the present trend is to consider the response as indicative of both sympathetic and parasympathetic activity (4). Thus, Hunt (11) has modified the earlier view of Landis and Hunt (16) in this direction. Somewhat more divergent opinions exist among psychologists as to the mental processes associated with the response (26).…”

Emotion Perception: Putting the Face in Context

“…Early investigations of context effects in emotion perception were motivated by relatively low "accuracy" in experiments that relied exclusively on the face (Hunt, 1941; Landis 1934). Accuracy was (and still is) defined as seeing (1) what the target intended to portray (in posed facial actions), (2) what the stimulus developer intended (in directed facial actions often based on predetermined configurations that have been described in the literature, e.g., EMFACS; Ekman & Friesen, 1982), (3) the emotion associated with the stimulus "condition" in which a target's facial actions occurred (for spontaneous facial actions), or (4) the self-reported state of the target individual (again for spontaneous facial actions).…”