In this article, I will examine the cognitive and perceptual processes that underlie emotion recognition abilities. First, I will contrast two rival explanations on the recognition of emotions and its conceptual assumptions: i) those that try to explain emotion recognition through inferential mechanisms vs. ii) those that explain it through direct social perception without inferences involved. Then, I will argue that if the direct perception proposal is accepted, the task of accounting for the c…
Read moreIn this article, I will examine the cognitive and perceptual processes that underlie emotion recognition abilities. First, I will contrast two rival explanations on the recognition of emotions and its conceptual assumptions: i) those that try to explain emotion recognition through inferential mechanisms vs. ii) those that explain it through direct social perception without inferences involved. Then, I will argue that if the direct perception proposal is accepted, the task of accounting for the cognitive processes or mechanisms that underlie these experiences of direct and significative perception of emotions still remains unanswered. In particular, I am going to argue that perceptual learning is a fruitful hypothesis to explain at least some cases of emotion recognition.
