More than Words? Semantic Emotion Labels Boost Context Effects on Faces.

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.

Bidirectional contextual influence between faces and bodies in emotion perception.

Recent evidence shows that body context may alter the categorization of facial expressions. However, less is known about how facial expressions influence the categorization of emotional bodies. We hypothesized that context effects would be displayed bidirectionally, from bodies to faces and from faces to bodies. Participants viewed emotional face-body compounds and were required to categorize emotions of faces (Condition 1), bodies (Condition 2), or full persons (Condition 3). Results showed evidence for bidirectional context effects: faces were influenced by bodies, and bodies were influenced by faces. However, because the specific confusability patterns differ for faces and bodies (e.g., disgust and anger expressions are confusable in the face, but less so in the body) we found unique patterns of contextual influence in each expression channel. Together, the findings suggest that the emotional expressions of faces and bodies contextualize each other bidirectionally and that emotion categorization is sensitive to the perceptual focus determined by task instructions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Recognition of emotion from subtle and non-stereotypical dynamic facial expressions in Huntington's disease.

Emotion recognition deficits in Huntington's disease (HD) are well-established. However, most previous studies have measured emotion recognition using stereotypical and intense facial expressions, which are easily recognized and artificial in their appearance. By contrast, everyday expressions are often more challenging to recognize, as they are subtle and non-stereotypical. Therefore, previous studies may have inflated the performance of HD patients and it is difficult to generalize their results to facial expressions encountered in everyday social interactions. In the present study, we tested 21 symptomatic HD patients and 28 healthy controls with a traditional facial expression set, as well as a novel stimulus set which exhibits subtle and non-stereotypical facial expressions. While HD patients demonstrated poor emotion recognition in both sets, when tested with the novel, ecologically looking facial expressions, patients' performance declined to chance level. Intriguingly, patients' emotion recognition deficit was predicted only by the severity of their motor symptoms, not by their cognitive status. This suggests a possible mechanism for emotion recognition impairments in HD, in line with embodiment theories. From this point of view, poor motor control may affect patients' ability to subtly produce and simulate a perceived facial expression, which in turn may contribute to their impaired recognition.