Facing fear: Expression of fear facilitates processing of emotional information

Evidence shows that manipulating the expressive component of fear can influence the processing of emotional information. Participants unobtrusively produced the expressive behaviors typical of fear, anger or happiness. Participants producing the expression of fear were faster at classifying verbal material with emotional content than participants producing the expressions of happiness or anger. These effects were especially pronounced for participants who were generally sensitive to their own bodily cues, as indicated by their degree of field-dependence measured by the Rod-and-Frame Task (Witkin & Asch, 1948). The results suggest that one way of eliciting the cognitive consequences of fear is by inducing the embodied expressive behavior.