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According to the semantic primacy hypothesis of emotion generation, stimuli must be semantically categorized to evoke emotions. This hypothesis was tested in two speeded reaction time experiments that also explored the processes underlying valence judgments. Participants viewed pleasant and unpleasant pictures. In different blocks of trials, they pressed a key as soon as they experienced the feeling evoked by a picture, recognized the depicted object, or detected the valence (pleasant/unpleasant) of the picture. Object recognition was significantly earlier than affect onset, and the two latencies were positively correlated. The latency of valence detection was in between the latencies of object recognition and affect and correlated with both. Experiment 2 additionally found that blurring the pictures delayed the onset of affect and that this effect was partially mediated by delayed object recognition. In contrast, false-coloring the pictures was found to delay affect mainly by reducing its intensity. Coloring also delayed valence judgments of pleasant pictures. The findings provide further chronometric support for the semantic primacy hypothesis of emotion generation and shed light on the processes underlying valence judgments. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Three studies examined the effects of experimentally manipulated surprise expressions on the experience of surprise. Surprise was induced by a sudden, unannounced change of the stimulus presentation during a computerized task. Facial expression was manipulated by leading participants to adopt an expression akin to surprise, or by forcing them to look up steeply to a monitor. The expression manipulations had no intensifying effect on the experience of surprise, whereas manipulations of unexpectedness and mental load had strong effects. In addition, mental load was found to affect beliefs about facial expression, suggesting that the participants used their feelings of surprise to infer their probable facial displays. Path analyses supported this reverse self-inference hypothesis.

Three experiments investigated the process of inferring emotions from brief descriptions of typical eliciting situations, using response time methodology. The initial hypothesis was that emotion inferences are mediated by inferred cognitive appraisals of the eliciting event (concerning e.g., its valence or the responsible agent). This hypothesis was contradicted by the finding of Experiment 1 that emotion judgments are typically made faster than appraisal judgments. To explain this finding, it was hypothesized that emotion judgments are based on automatized (proceduralized) appraisal inferences. This hypothesis was tested in Experiments 2 and 3 using a judgment facilitation paradigm. The results supported the proceduralization hypothesis by demonstrating that appraisal judgments are facilitated by prior emotion judgments.

In his commentary on M. Siemer and R. Reisenzein (2007), B. Parkinson (2007) raised a number of important questions concerning the process of emotion inference and the scope of appraisal theories. Siemer and Reisenzein first examine the alternative explanations of their findings proposed by Parkinson and then look at the alternative "situated" view of emotions proposed by him. The main conclusion is that the issues raised by Parkinson can be dealt with by (suitable extensions of) appraisal theory.

R. E. Thayer (1989) proposed 2 types of activation: energetic arousal (awake-tired) and tense arousal (tense-calm). This view has been challenged by claims that energetic arousal and tense arousal are mixtures of valence and a single activation dimension. The authors present a direct test of this hypothesis by computing the correlation between the residuals of energetic arousal and tense arousal after removing the shared variance with valence. Whereas the valence activation hypothesis predicts a strong positive correlation between the 2 residuals, the authors found that it was not significantly different from 0. This finding reaffirms the view of energetic arousal and tense arousal as 2 distinct types of activation.