Abstract
Semantic emotional labels can influence the recognition of isolated facial expressions. However, it is unknown if labels also influence the susceptibility of facial expressions to context. To examine this, participants categorized expressive faces presented with emotionally congruent or incongruent bodies, serving as context. Face-body composites were presented together, aligned in their natural form, or spatially misaligned with the head shifted horizontally beside the body—a condition known to reduce the contextual impact of the body on the face. Critically, participants responded either by choosing emotion labels or by perceptually matching the target expression with expression probes. The results show a label dominance effect: Face-body congruency effects were larger with semantic labels than with perceptual expression matching, indicating that facial expressions are more prone to contextual influence when categorized with emotion labels, an effect only found when faces and bodies were aligned. These findings suggest that the role of conceptual language in face-body context effects may be larger than previously assumed.
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Data are publicly available at https://osf.io/bxa3z/?view_only=204f484645764f1a99fc62ead7b08a27.
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This work was supported by an Israel Science Foundation (ISF) grant to Hillel Aviezer (#259/18).
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All studies reported in this manuscript underwent ethical review and were approved by The University Committee for the Use of Human Subjects in Research Institutional Review Board The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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Lecker, M., Aviezer, H. More than Words? Semantic Emotion Labels Boost Context Effects on Faces. Affec Sci 2, 163–170 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-021-00043-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-021-00043-z