Associate Professor Jamin Halberstadt
 Contact
Details
Tel 64 3 479 8289
Email jhalbers@psy.otago.ac.nz
Cognition-Emotion Interactions
My primary interest is in the role of emotional responses
in cognitive processing. We have previously found that stimuli
in the world will sometimes be categorised (ie, grouped
together and treated similarly) not because they are
physically similar, but because they evoke the same emotional
response in the perceiver. My current research explores
the social consequences of emotional similarity. Under
what circumstances do people consult their feelings to make
decisions, and what sorts of decisions are they willing to
make?
In addition to the effects of affect on categorisation I
also study the complementary issue: the effects of categorisation
on affect. Initial studies have shown that stimuli that
are easily categorised (because they are highly prototypical
of their categories) tend to be judged as attractive, a finding
with important implications for explanations of attractiveness
in human faces. I am now examining the roles of both
subjective familiarity (whether a stimulus feels familiar)
and objective familiarity (whether a stimulus has in fact
been encountered before) in the averageness-attractiveness
relationship, which interestingly appear to be different for
natural versus artificial categories.
Another area of interest concerns the effects of introspection
and verbalisation in social judgement. Previous research indicates
that reasoning can actually impair performance in some domains.
My research has been documenting these domains, which include
behavioural predictions, decision making, memory for emotions
and emotional expressions, and face recognition, and attempting
to understand the mechanisms through which impairment occurs.
Halberstadt, J. B., Goldstone, R., & Levine, G. (2003).
Featural processing in face preferences. Journal of Experimental
Social Psychology, 39, 270-278.
Halberstadt, J. B., & Niedenthal, P. M. (2001). Effects of
emotion concepts on perceptual memory for emotional expressions.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(4),
587-598.
Halberstadt, J. B., & Rhodes, G. (2000). The attractiveness
of non-face averages: Implications for an evolutionary explanation
of the attractiveness of average faces. Psychological
Science, 11(4), 289-293.
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