How we perceive emotion

Something I have learned - and feel is worth sharing with people, because it truly is fascinating - is about how people perceive emotions. So prepare to have your minds blown!

Before I give you the readers digest version, I need to let you know that there are competing theories about this, and that there are even different theories about what emotions actually are (I challenge you to come up with a definition!).

So how do we perceive emotions?
Interestingly, this ability requires our own internal simulation of the emotional state. That is, to perceive another person as being happy, you need to - in some way - experience this "happiness" for yourself (whether by some form of volitional imitation or by automatic mimicry). This does not necessarily entail that you - when faced with a fearful person - suddenly get infected with their emotion and begin to show outward fear-stimulated behaviours before you interpret their emotional expression as fear, but a comparison process takes place whereby the perceptual information you get is processed by the premotor cortex and/or posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) (part of your brain responsible for guidance of your physical movement, amongst other things). In other words, you essentially internally simulate what is happening in order to understand it. (As an interesting aside, people who have larger pSTS's have been found to be more altruistic! Go figure...).

Although I might point out that you certainly CAN experience this "catching" of someone else's emotion - there is a large literature on the phenomena, called emotional contagion. Now you know why you like being around happy people - because they make you happy :-)
This, and other evidence from studies on empathy and neurophysiological studies on imitation focusing on mirror neurons (I don't have time to go into these here, but let me encourage you to look them up - they're sweet action) have provided much of the empirical basis for the above view.

Cool huh!?