Simultaneously Presented Facial and Contextual Information Influences Observers' Facial Expressions and Self-reports of Emotion, 2018-2019

We receive emotional signals from different sources, including the face and its surrounding context. Previous research has shown the effect that facial expressions and contextual affective information have on people’s brain responses. This study measured physiological responses and ratings of affect to face-context compounds of varied emotional content. Forty-two participants freely viewed face-context and context-only natural threat, mutilation, happy, erotic and neutral scenes whilst corrugator, zygomatic and startle eyeblink responses were recorded. Concerning the emotional content presented, participants’ corrugator, zygomatic, startle eyeblink responses and their valence and arousal ratings varied with the stimuli valence and arousal matched the stimuli valence. Face-context threat and mutilation scenes elicited more negative emotional experiences and larger corrugator responses than context-only scenes. In contrast, happy face-context scenes elicited more positive emotional experiences and a decreased corrugator response. The zygomatic showed an enhanced response to face-context scenes, regardless of the valence of the scenes. Our results show that the simultaneous perception of emotional signals from faces and contextual information induce enhanced facial reactions and affective responses.