Abstract
In a sample of 325 college students, we examined how context influences judgments of facial expressions of emotion, using a newly developed facial affect recognition task in which emotional faces are superimposed upon emotional and neutral contexts. This research used a larger sample size than previous studies, included more emotions, varied the intensity level of the expressed emotion to avoid potential ceiling effects from very easy recognition, did not explicitly direct attention to the context, and aimed to understand how recognition is influenced by non-facial information, both situationally-relevant and situationally-irrelevant. Both accuracy and RT varied as a function of context. For all facial expressions of emotion other than happiness, accuracy increased when the emotion of the face and context matched, and decreased when they mismatched. For all emotions, participants responded faster when the emotion of the face and image matched and slower when they mismatched. Results suggest that the judgment of the facial expression is itself influenced by the contextual information instead of both being judged independently and then combined. Additionally, the results have implications for developing models of facial affect recognition and indicate that there are factors other than the face that can influence facial affect recognition judgments.
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Notes
Whereas a log linear transformation was conducted on RT data to correct for skewness/kurtosis, the skewness/kurtosis of the accuracy data was within normal range. Therefore, no data transformation was conducted on accuracy data.
The mismatch score was calculated by averaging across all of the different mismatching emotional contexts (e.g., for a sad facial expression, mismatching emotional contexts would be happy, fear, and disgust expressions).
The particular emotion used as context had a large effect on RTs (average Cohen’s d = 1.12), whereas it had only a small effect on accuracy (average Cohen’s d = .25). Consequently, to illustrate the effect of the degree to which match versus mismatch of context influenced RTs, we adjusted the RTs based on the average RT for each individual context emotion. For example, the adjusted RT for disgust faces with matching context was computed as the average RT for disgust faces with disgust context divided by the average RT for all faces with disgust context.
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The authors would like to thank Jesse Spencer-Smith, Ph.D., for his valuable comments and suggestions to help improve this manuscript.
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Milanak, M.E., Berenbaum, H. The effects of context on facial affect recognition. Motiv Emot 38, 560–568 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-014-9401-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-014-9401-x