PART 6: Sensation and Perception

16.7 Motivation and Emotion

Perceptions are also influenced, top-down, by our motivation and emotions.

Hearing sad rather than happy music can predispose people to perceive a sad meaning in spoken homophonic words—mourning rather than morning, die rather than dye, pain rather than pane (Halberstadt et al., 1996). After listening to irritating (and anger-cuing) music, people perceive a harmful action such as robbery as more serious (Seidel & Prinz, 2013). Dennis Proffitt (2006a, b; Schnall et al., 2008) and others have demonstrated the power of emotions with other clever experiments showing that

walking destinations look farther away to those fatigued by prior exercise.
a hill looks steeper to those who are wearing a heavy backpack or have just been exposed to sad, heavy classical music rather than light, bouncy music. As with so many of life’s challenges, a hill also seems less steep to those who feel others understand them (Oishi et al., 2013).
a target seems farther away to those throwing a heavy rather than a light object at it.
a softball appears bigger when you are hitting well. Jessica Witt and Proffitt (2005) observed this after asking players to choose a circle the size of the ball they had just hit well or poorly. (There’s also a reciprocal phenomenon: Seeing a target as bigger—as happens when athletes focus directly on a target—improves performance [Witt et al., 2012].)

Motives also matter. Desired objects, such as a water bottle when thirsty, seem closer (Balcetis & Dunning, 2010). This perceptual bias energizes our going for it. Our motives also direct our perception of ambiguous stimuli.

“When you’re hitting the ball, it comes at you looking like a grapefruit. When you’re not, it looks like a black-eyed pea.”

Former major league baseball player George Scott

Emotions and motives color our social perceptions, too. People more often perceive solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, and cold temperatures as “torture” when experiencing a small dose of such themselves (Nordgren et al., 2011). Spouses who feel loved and appreciated perceive less threat in stressful marital events—“He’s just having a bad day” (Murray et al., 2003). The moral of these stories: To believe is, indeed, to see.