In research published by the journal Science, Northeastern University professor Lisa Feldman Barrett and her team found that gossip not only changes what humans know about each other, it literally affects how they see each other.

The Experement

Participants in two experiments first saw neutral faces paired with negative gossip, positive gossip, or neutral gossip, so that they learned which faces were bad, good or neutral.

When faces were then paired with another unrelated image -- such as a house -- and presented to the participant, the face associated with the negative gossip was more likely to be seen consciously, compared to faces previously paired with positive or neutral gossip, or completely novel faces.

The Visual Impact Of Gossip

The research shows that gossip doesn't just change your opinion of another person, it also changes the way you see a person, visually.

The findings are surprising because they show that you don't come to know the world through only your external senses - your feelings also influence how you visually see the world.

Usually we assume that what you see influences what you feel. Here's a case where what you feel about someone influences what you see visually.

About Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett

Dr. Barrett's research focuses on the nature of emotion from both psychological and neuroscience perspectives, and takes inspiration from anthropology, philosophy, and linguistics. Her lab takes an interdisciplinary perspective approach, and incorporates methods from social, clinical, and personality psychology, psychophysiology, cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, and visual cognition. Current projects focus on understanding the psychological construction of emotion (i.e., how basic affective and conceptual ingredients provide the recipes for emotional experiences), age- and disease-related changes in affective circuitry within the human brain, how language and context influence emotion perception, how affect influences vision, and sex differences in emotion.

Source:
Northeastern University