Emotion perception: Putting the face in context

Abstract

Two studies tested the hypothesis that in judging people's emotions from their facial expressions, Japanese, more than Westerners, incorporate information from the social context. In Study 1, participants viewed cartoons depicting a happy, sad, angry, or neutral person surrounded by other people expressing the same emotion as the central person or a different one. The surrounding people's emotions influenced Japanese but not Westerners' perceptions of the central person. These differences reflect differences in attention, as indicated by eye-tracking data (Study 2): Japanese looked at the surrounding people more than did Westerners. Previous findings on East–West differences in contextual sensitivity generalize to social contexts, suggesting that Westerners see emotions as individual feelings, whereas Japanese see them as inseparable from the feelings of the group.

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The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Psychology
Daniel Reisberg
Print publication date: Jun 2013
Print ISBN-13: 9780195376746
Published to Oxford Handbooks Online: Jun-13
Subject: Psychology, Cognitive Psychology
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195376746.001.0001
Emotion Perception: Putting the Face in Context
Maria Gendron, Batja Mesquita, Lisa Feldman Barrett
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195376746.013.0034
Abstract and Keywords
Emotion perception research is dominated by the assumption that emotions
are written on the face as particular arrangements of facial actions. This
face-focused paradigm assumes that posed, static configurations of facial
muscle movements provide sufficient cues to emotion, such that the study of
context is secondary. As a result, it has been assumed that the mechanisms
for perceiving posed, static facial actions reveal the mechanisms that
support emotion perception outside of the laboratory setting. In this chapter,
we review this face-focused paradigm in emotion perception and contrast it
with experimental findings that place the face in context. Furthermore, we
question whether a posed face is ever without context, even in a lab. We
discuss how features of an experiment can serve (however unintentionally)
as a context that influences performance in emotion perception tasks. Based
on the literature reviewed, we conclude that the study of emotion perception
is necessarily contextualized, such that context not only influences emotion
perception, but it might be intrinsic to seeing an emotion in the first place.
emotion, perception, facial expression, context
An iconic fear face looks startled—eyes wide, mouth agape, and eyebrows
raised. An iconic anger face is scowling—brows furrowed, eyes glowering,
and jaw tightened. An iconic sad face is frowning—lips pouting, brows pulled
together. These posed, exaggerated faces dominate a research paradigm
in the psychology of emotion perception. Simply exposing a perceiver to
one of these faces is assumed to produce an automatic “recognition” that

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reflects some statistical regularity in the faces that populate the emotion
category, and this automatic perception is taken as evidence that there is
an evolutionarily preserved capability to “decode” facial actions for their
psychological meaning. Several notable experiments (Ekman, 1972, 1973;
Ekman & Freisen, 1971; Ekman, Sorensen, & Friesen, 1969; Izard, 1971)
within this face-focused approach have captured the attention of textbook
writers and have become part of the standard curriculum in psychology.
These experiments have also captured the imagination of other academic
disciplines. The face-focused approach to emotion perception (where
emotional information is written on the face) guides cognitive neuroscience
studies of emotion perception (e.g., Breiter, Etcoff, Whalen, Kennedy, Rauch,
Buckner, et al., 1996; Phillips et al., 1997; Sprengelmeyer, Rauch, Eysel, &
Przuntek, 1998; for a discussion, see Watson, 2004). Research investigating
social and emotional deficits in people with mental disorders, brain lesions,
and neurodegenerative disease almost exclusively relies on the face-focused
approach (e.g., Kohler, Walker, Martin, Healey, & Moberg, 2010). The face-
focused approach also informs government spending on security training.
For example, over 3,000 TSA employees have received security training to
“read” emotion in the face, in the hopes of keeping citizens safe (Weinberger,
2010). Even the popular media is enamored with this paradigm, as evidenced
by television shows such as “Lie to Me” and popular science writing such as
Malcolm Gladwell’s The Naked Face (2002).
The face-focused approach to emotion perception has several key features.
First, this approach views the face as transmitting evolved signals that
broadcast the internal state of a target person for perceivers to see (Keltner,
Ekman, Gonzaga, & Beer, 2003). Data to support this view come in several
varieties: (1) descriptions of facial behaviors that occur in emotion across
cultures (e.g., Scherer & Wallbott, 1994); (2) cross-cultural production of
facial behaviors during the experience of emotion (e.g., “negative” facial
behaviors in Japanese and American students, Ekman, 1973; for review,
see Matsumoto, Keltner, Shiota, Frank, & O’Sullivan, 2008, pp. 215–216);
or (3) expressions produced by congenitally blind individuals as compared
to sighted individuals (e.g., Matsumoto & Willingham, 2009). In this regard,
“emotion perception” is redefined as “emotion recognition.”
A second aspect of the face-focused approach is that emotion perception
is an innate psychological process (e.g., Schyns, Petro, & Smith, 2009).
Data used to support this point come from (1) studies on cross-cultural
recognition of emotion (for reviews, see Ekman, 1998; Izard, 1977; but see
Russell, 1994), (2) work on the “efficiency” or automaticity of perception

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(e.g., Schyns et al., 2009; Tracy & Robins, 2008), (3) work on the categorical
perception of emotion (e.g., Etcoff & Magee, 1992), and (4) emotion
perception in infants (e.g., Hoehl & Striano, 2008; for review, see Hoehl &
Striano, 2010).
A third aspect of this view is that context (i.e., information aside from the
face) is not necessary for successful emotion perception. For example,
seeing emotion in another person is assumed to proceed “automatically,
silently, and without the benefit of language” (Izard, 1994, p. 289). In
some views, emotion perception is even resistant to contextual influences
(e.g., Nakamura, Buck, & Kenny, 1990). Emotion perception is assumed to
proceed in a feedforward fashion, with more complex “cognitive” processing
coming online relatively late and secondary to the perceptual processing of
emotional faces (for a discussion, see Vuilleumier & Pourtois, 2007).
Because of these assumptions, the face-focused approach to studying
emotion perception typically presents
1
perceivers with faces that are
posing exaggerated facial actions that are devoid of a bodily, vocal, or
situational context. Yet in everyday life, faces move in concert with bodies
and vocalizations in a way that is typically calibrated to the situation at hand.
Even proponents have noted the oddity of the face-focused experimental
paradigm (e.g., Ekman & O’Sullivan, 1988). Unfortunately, much of the
literature has yet to take these ecological concerns to heart—researchers
routinely present posed, static faces like those from Ekman and Freisen’s
(1976) set to examine how accurately perceivers can categorize these
disembodied, posed faces.
In this chapter, we discuss recent empirical challenges to a face-focused
approach to emotion perception. We focus on research that places the face
into context, demonstrating that context dramatically shapes how faces
portraying emotion are processed. We also explore the idea that the typical
laboratory paradigm serves as its own form of context, one that is often
unintended (and unrecognized) by the experimenter. We close the chapter
by discussing the implications of context-based modulation for the future
of emotion perception research. We suggest that context does more than
modulate emotion perception; instead, it might serve as a necessary source
of information in emotion perception.
Putting the Face in Context
Early investigations of context effects in emotion perception were motivated
by relatively low “accuracy” in experiments that relied exclusively on the

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face (Hunt, 1941; Landis 1934). Accuracy was (and still is) defined as seeing
(1) what the target intended to portray (in posed facial actions), (2) what
the stimulus developer intended (in directed facial actions often based on
predetermined configurations that have been described in the literature,
e.g., EMFACS; Ekman & Friesen, 1982), (3) the emotion associated with
the stimulus “condition” in which a target’s facial actions occurred (for
spontaneous facial actions), or (4) the self-reported state of the target
individual (again for spontaneous facial actions). Citing a number of
experiments in which perceivers failed to agree on the emotion conveyed
by faces, Hunt and Landis concluded that the face does not provide reliable
information about emotion for the perceiver. This conclusion led researchers
to explore what information, in addition to the face, is needed for perceptions
of discrete emotions like anger, sadness, and fear. These experiments,
published mainly between the 1920s and 1930s, examined whether contexts
such as bodies, hands, vocalizations, and situational knowledge contributed
to emotion perception over and above the facial actions that they were
paired with. Although this research was criticized on methodological grounds
(Ekman, Freisen, & Ellsworth, 1972), more recent, well-designed research
has emerged to again raise the question of whether context is an important
determinant in emotion perception. As we will see in the coming pages, this
more modern research makes it clear that a face does not speak for itself, at
least where emotion
2
is concerned.
Stimulus-Based Context
One of the most obvious sources of context in studies of emotion perception
is the physical array in which a face is embedded, or what we refer to as
“stimulus-based” context. Some stimulus-based context derives from the
target person who produced the facial actions, such as bodily posture or
movement, vocalizations, and even the target’s sweat. Other forms of
context characterize the broader “event” in which a face appears. Studies
investigating stimulus-based forms of context have examined both influence
of congruent (e.g., a startled face on a fearful body) and incongruent
contexts (e.g., a pouting face following an anger situation), demonstrating
both facilitation and interference effects.
Bodies
In 1935, Kline and Johannesen demonstrated that perceivers are more
accurate (i.e., to select the emotion category intended by the researcher)
when a face portraying emotion was presented in a congruent bodily context

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(compared to when the face was presented alone). These data indicated
that the body helps to increase interrater agreement about the feelings
of a target over information derived from the face alone. In the last few
years, there has been a spike of interest in the idea that body postures are a
salient cue that perceivers use to understand others’ emotional states (see
de Gelder, 2009). For example, when posed faces and bodies portray the
same emotion category, emotion perception in the face is facilitated; when
body and face are incongruent, emotion perception in the face is impaired
(Meeren, van Heijnsbergen, & de Gelder, 2005). Perception of a wide-eyed
face on a body adopting an angry posture was less accurate than when
that same face was placed on a body adopting a fearful posture. Strikingly,
event-related potential (ERP) recordings reflect the incongruence between
facial and bodily portrayals of emotion as soon as 115 ms after stimulus
onset. And, remarkably, bodies also provide information about emotion for
nonhuman perceivers: A computer classifier trained separately on faces and
bodies portraying emotion demonstrated higher classification accuracy for
the two cues combined than with either one alone (Gunes & Piccardi, 2007).
There are even times when bodies dominate over faces during emotion
perception. A scowl (i.e., a portrayal of anger) is more likely to be perceived
as disgusted when it is paired with a body posture involving a soiled object
(Aviezer, Hassin, Ryan, et al., 2008, Study 1) and a face portraying disgust
can even by perceived as displaying a positive emotion (i.e., pride) when
paired with a muscled body whose arms are raised in triumph (Aviezer,
Hassin, Ryan, et al., 2008, Study 2). Not all studies have found that bodies
provide incremental information over faces during emotion perception,
however (e.g., Rozin, Taylor, Ross, Bennett, & Hejnadi, 2005).
Hand gestures, too, can influence emotion perception in a face (Hietanen &
Leppänen, 2008). Participants were more accurate to judge scowling faces as
angry when paired with congruent hand gestures (a neutral sentence signed
in Finnish Sign Language in an angry manner) and were least accurate to
judge anger when scowls were paired with happy hand gestures (that same
sentence signed in a happy manner). Perception of neutral faces was also
biased toward “anger” when paired with angry hand gestures.
Vocalizations
The voice constitutes a second type of stimulus-based context for perception
of emotion in facial actions. The voice alone is an important conduit of
affective tone, most effectively conveying arousal (Bachorowski, 1999;
Pittam, Gallois, & Callan, 1990) and valence to a lesser extent (Bachorowski

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& Owren, 2008; Pereira, 2000). Importantly, vocal depictions shape emotion
perception based on facial actions (e.g., de Gelder & Vroomen, 2000;
Massaro & Egan, 1996; for a review, see de Gelder et al., 2006).
3
For
example, perceivers judge ambiguous facial actions (i.e., a morph between
a smiling “happy” face and a frowning “sad” face) in line with the affective
value conveyed by vocalizations (i.e., prosody conveying sadness or
happiness) even when they are told to judge the face alone (de Gelder &
Vroomen, 2000). The effect of prosody on emotion perception in a face is
most robust when the face is ambiguous (i.e., does not portray a single
emotion in a caricatured manner; de Gelder & Vroomen, 2000), neutral
(Massaro & Egan, 1996), or visually noisy (Collignon et al., 2008), although
prosody also primes judgments of faces portraying congruent emotional
content (Pell, 2005). Additional work is needed to clarify whether the effects
of vocal prosody reflect affect congruence or a more specific discrete
emotion congruence effect. Future work could use stimuli that are controlled
for valence and arousal (e.g., fear and disgust in Phillips et al., 1998) to
evaluate whether congruence or interference effects occur when vocal
portrayals matched in affect, but not emotion, accompany facial actions.
Neuroimaging studies suggest that facial and vocal information are
integrated in a variety of brain regions involved in perception. For example,
facial and vocal portrayals of fear and disgust separately produced an
increase in activation within the superior temporal gyrus, inferior posterior
temporal gyrus, middle temporal gyrus, and medial frontal cortex (Phillips
et al., 1998). Congruent combinations of negative facial and vocal cues
produced an increase in activation in the left amygdala and right fusiform
and several other structures in the distributed face-processing network
(Dolan, Morris, & de Gelder, 2001). However, positive facial and vocal
congruency produced increases in a distinct network of regions (i.e., left
superior parietal lobule, the left medial parietal cortex, the left superior
frontal gyrus, and the right anterior cingulate cortex). In another study,
brain activity in some of these same regions—the medial prefrontal cortex
(MPFC) and left superior temporal sulcus (STS) was linked to the category
of emotion being perceived, regardless of the modality in which the cues
occured (Peelen, Atkinson, & Vuilleumier, 2010). The amygdala, on the other
hand, appears to be particularly important to the processing of combined
facial and vocal cues. When startled faces portraying fear were accompanied
by a sentence spoken in a fearful tone, perceivers judged the face as
more negative than when that same face was presented alone, and these
judgments were correlated with amygdala activation, which the authors
interpret as evidence that the amygdala computes affective meaning based

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on multiple cues (Ethofer et al., 2007). It is also possible, however, that
the faces were unfamiliar and ambiguous (i.e., not clearly indicative of
one discrete emotion) to perceivers (Somerville & Whalen, 2006) and the
vocal cues made their psychological meaning even more uncertain. Similar
effects have been demonstrated in nonhuman primates, such that the same
neurons in the central nucleus of the amygdala fired to the presentation of
vocalizations and facial actions representing aggressive threat, scream, or
coo (Kuraoka & Nakamura, 2007), which are thought to be homologous with
expressions in humans (Parr & Waller, 2006).
Some work has investigated the time course of vocalization context effects,
with discrepant results. Research using magnetoencephalography (MEG)
demonstrates that the integration of voices and faces portraying emotion
occurs within 250 ms after stimulus onset in the superior temporal sulcus
(Hagan et al., 2009).
4
Yet other data suggest that the time frame of prosody
effects is much slower than 250 ms. In an implicit priming task where
prosodic cues preceded faces, only vocalizations longer than 600 ms
produced facilitation in judgments of a congruent emotional faces (Pell,
2005). It is unclear what this time constraint means, but one possibility is
that despite early integration in the STS, behavioral facilitation will only
occur with stimuli of sufficiently long duration, perhaps because conceptual
knowledge based on vocalizations determines whether the emotion
judgment will be affected. Alternatively, a longer presentation duration
might only be important for instances when vocalizations and faces are not
presented simultaneously. This would suggest that distinct mechanisms
might be responsible for context effects based on simultaneous versus
sequential presentation of cues.
Chemosignals
Even a target person’s sweat can influence perception of emotion from
the face (Zhou & Chen, 2009). For example, researchers collected sweat
from target individuals while they viewed videos designed to induce fear
or happiness. A second group of individuals then sniffed this sweat as they
were completing an emotion perception task. Perceivers demonstrated
better accuracy for the perception of startled “fear” faces when sniffing the
“fearful” sweat compared to those sniffing the “happy” sweat. Interestingly,
perceivers could not distinguish between the two types of sweat via self-
report, suggesting this was not an explicit conceptual priming effect. This
study did not investigate whether this facilitation might be driven by the
quantity of sweat perceivers were exposed to (sweat was not measured,

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only collected on a gauze pad under the arms of participants). Furthermore,
it is possible that sweat influences the perception of affect, rather than the
perception of discrete emotion categories (given that happiness and fear
differ in their basic affective quality).
Situations
In the 1910s and 1920s, Lev Kuleshov performed filmmaking “experiments”
that famously demonstrated how situational context influences the emotion
perceived in another person’s facial actions. He spliced the same neutral
expression with different scenes that were emotional in nature, leading
audiences to believe that the expression on the actor’s face was changing.
With no “signal” present in the face, perceivers still saw emotion when the
context called for it. In fact, audiences raved about the superb acting in
the film. More recently, the “Kuleshov effect” has proved to be somewhat
more complex. When neutral faces were paired with common causes of
emotion, such as missing a train, participants made judgments that reflected
either the situation or the face, in equivalent amounts (Carrera-Levillain &
Fernández-Dols, 1994). When the situation was more extreme, such as brake
failure on a mountain pass, the “neutral” facial behaviors tended to dominate
the judgment—perceivers overwhelmingly saw that face as neutral.
Other experiments investigating the influence of situational effects on
emotion perception are as old as the first studies on the Kuleshov effect. For
example, two different sets of perceivers judged spontaneous facial actions
in infants that were either isolated from the context or paired with the
eliciting situation (Sherman, 1927). Perceivers generated up to 25 different
emotion labels for a given set of spontaneous facial actions in infants when
they were presented in isolation. Agreement was higher for the perceivers
who judged the facial actions in their eliciting circumstances (e.g., without
context 15% of perceivers saw “fear,” with context 65% did) (see also Munn,
1940). These experiments have been critiqued based on their methods (see
Ekman et al., 1972), but more recent, better controlled, studies confirm that
perceivers agree more on the emotion conveyed by a face when the facial
actions are placed in a congruent context than when they are presented
alone (Carroll & Russell 1996; Knudsen & Muzekari, 1983). Apparently,
context can diminish the ambiguity (i.e., lack of interrater agreement about
the emotional meaning) of posed facial actions, even when the actions depict
highly caricatured expressions as in recent experiments.

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A number of findings also point to a situational modulation of judgments
when facial actions and the situation are “incongruent.” For example,
participants asked to make emotion judgments based on combinations
of incongruent situational descriptions and facial actions made 55.7% of
judgments consistent with the situation and 31.6% consistent with the
facial behaviors (Goodenough & Tinker, 1931). These data suggest that the
situation may be a stronger cue when it is inconsistent with information
from a face. This general finding was replicated using bodily and situational
information conveyed by a visual scene (Munn, 1940), film clips (Goldberg,
1951), and video of the actual eliciting circumstances (Sherman, 1927).
More recently, this finding has received further support (Fernandez-Dols,
Sierra, & Ruiz-Belda, 1993; Fernandez-Dols, Wallbot & Sanchez, 1991, Study
2; Spignesi & Shor, 1981; Wallbott, 1988a, Study 2; Wallbott, 1988b). For
example, portrayals of anger are more likely to be perceived as fearful
when paired with the description of a dangerous situation (Carroll & Russell,
1996, Study 1). Yet other studies have failed to show that contextual
information can override information in the face in driving emotion
judgments (Fernandez-Dols et al., 1991, Study 1, 3; Nakamura et al., 1990;
Wallbott, 1988a, Study 1; for a review see, Fernandez-Dols & Carroll, 1997).
5
Situational information tends to dominate perception of emotion in faces
both when situations are common, everyday (Carrera-Levillain & Fernández-
Dols, 1994) and even when situations are more ambiguous (i.e., contain less
source clarity) than the exaggerated facial actions being perceived (Carroll
& Russell, 1996, Study 3). This integration of situational context and facial
actions also appears to develop over the lifespan, with children (ages 4–10)
using situational over facial information for all emotions portrayals except
surprise (Widen & Russell, 2010). Other data suggests that older children
(third grade) are most accurate when both types of cues are present, and
younger children (preschool) demonstrate advantages for stories (situational
information) over faces portraying emotion (Reichenbach & Masters, 1983).
The use of situational context might be enhanced by the epistemic goal
to perceive emotion as opposed to affect. For example, informationally
irrelevant context is automatically encoded when perceivers were asked to
judge the emotion in posed faces (i.e., “Is this person afraid or disgusted?”)
but not when they were asked to perceive affect (i.e., “Would you approach
or avoid this person?”), suggesting that the structural configuration of faces
carries information about the affective state of the target, but processing
a face in context is necessary for perceiving emotion (Barrett & Kensinger,
2010). (This is consistent with earlier work showing that perceivers use basic
affective dimensions like valence and arousal rather than discrete categories

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of emotion to understand posed facial behaviors in isolation; Russell &
Bullock, 1986; Schlosberg, 1952.) Interestingly, perceivers’ memory for the
situational context was just as strong as memory for the focal face itself
during emotion perception, suggesting that faces and contexts are processed
configurally during emotion perception. (For related results, see Frühholz,
Fehr, & Herrmann, 2009; Warner & Shields, 2009.)
The impact of situational context during emotion perception extends beyond
explicit judgments of emotion to the gaze pattern used for faces. Perceivers’
visual fixations on a face reflect the larger context (including the body) in
which that face is embedded (Aviezer, Hassin, Ryan, et al., 2008) suggesting
that the context changes which facial features are visually salient.
The neural responses that realize emotion perception are also shaped by
situational context. Neural activity associated with a surprised face preceded
by a negative sentence was greater in ventral regions of the amygdala, in
comparison to when a surprise face was preceded by a positive sentence
(Kim et al., 2004). Amygdala activity was also modulated by the congruence
of a situational context and facial actions in a recent demonstration of the
Kuleshov effect (Mobbs et al., 2006). A network of regions associated with
processing the “emotionality” of a face (i.e., ACC, left STS, right STS, right
amygdala, and the bilateral temporal pole) was more engaged when a face
was presented following an “emotional” video compared to a “neutral”
video. Incongruent context revealed specific activity in the ventromedial
prefrontal cortex, whereas the combination of a fearful face and negative
context revealed activity in the right amygdala, fusiform gyrus, and bilateral
temporal pole and insula. It is believed that this network of regions works
together to instantiate an emotion percept based on both facial actions and
the context that accompanies them. Similarly, visual regions such as bilateral
inferior occipital, bilateral fusiform, right inferior frontal gyrus, as well as
left amygdala were engaged when participants were asked to match an
emotional face to a context (Sommer, Döhnel, Meinhardt, & Hajak, 2008),
suggesting that these regions play a role in integrating situational context
and facial actions when the goal is to produce a coherent emotional percept.
Amygdala activation was related to the goal to perceive emotion based on
context and facial actions, because when these same stimuli were presented
but were incidental to a color-matching task, amygdala activity did not differ
from a control condition. Taken together, these findings suggest that when
the epistemic goal is to perceive emotion, neural activity in regions involved
in the perceptual processing of faces is shaped by the context in which faces
are embedded. Since context modulates the same regions that are typically

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associated with the formation of an emotional percept to begin with, it can
be argued that context is integral to the emotional percept itself, rather than
a postperceptual decision process.
Other Faces
Finally, other faces serve as another strong form of stimulus-based context
in emotion perception, even when those other faces are irrelevant to the
task at hand. For example, in an early study designed to examine “social
context,” perceivers were presented with a line drawing of two faces oriented
toward one another (Cline, 1956). The faces depicted either a low-arousal
negative emotion (“glum”), a high-arousal negative emotion (“frown”), or
high-arousal positive emotion (“smile”). Participants assigned a different
meaning to the face depending on the other face it was paired with. For
example, participants perceived smiles as bolder when paired with the low-
arousal “glum” expression than when paired with the high-arousal “frown”
expression. In more recent experiments, perceivers judged faces as more
intense when they followed with several faces of opposite valence (e.g., a
frowning face following a smiling face) (Thayer, 1980). Similarly, perceived
arousal level of anger and surprised facial portrayals can also be shifted
based on the facial portrayal they follow (Russell & Fehr, 1987, Studies
5 & 6). Perception of a neutral face also shifted when it was presented
concurrently with (Russell & Fehr, 1987, Studies 1 & 2) or following another
face portraying emotion (Tanaka-Matsumi, Attivissimo, Nelson, & D’Urso,
1995). These effects occurred despite instructions for participants to judge
the target face independently of the other stimuli. The size of the context
effect produced by other faces appears to be culturally relative, however
(Masuda, Ellsworth, Mesquita, Leu, & Veerdonk, 2008). Japanese perceivers’
judgments of a target individual reflected the emotions conveyed by the
other figures in a scene, but this was less true for Americans perceivers, who
focused mainly on the target person.
The processing of surrounding nontarget faces is also evident in patterns
of brain activity (Amtig, Miller, Chow, & Mitchell, 2009). Posterior regions of
visual cortex are more engaged when all faces are consistent in affective
content, whereas the amygdala response is selectively lessened for positive
faces in the context of neutral or negative faces. Enhanced functional
connectivity emerged between the amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex
on trials where the target face was inconsistent in affective value with the
nontarget faces, and this functional connectivity predicted longer reaction
times. These data suggest that connectivity between the amygdala and

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medial prefrontal cortex reflects a process aimed at resolving competition
between conflicting affective content (c.f. Lieberman et al., 2007). It is
unclear based on these data whether this same connectivity would result
from within valence competition, however.
Perceiver-Based Context
Whereas stimulus-based forms of context are driven by something in
the external surroundings, perceiver-based forms of context are driven
by the internal state of the perceiver. In this section, we focus on how
emotion perception in the face is influenced by the perceiver’s immediate
psychological state. Other forms of context that might be categorized as
“perceiver based,” such as those based on personality, culture, ethnicity,
gender, or psychopathology, are beyond the scope of the present review.
Cognitive Load
Emotion perception depends on the amount of executive attention that
is available to a perceiver, and so attention becomes a relevant aspect
of the perceiver-based context. Although researchers often believe that
emotion perception is automatic (e.g., emotion recognition is above-chance
under conditions of cognitive load; Tracy & Robins, 2008), there are often
methodological circumstances that should constrain explanations for
observed effects. For example, in the Tracy and Robbins study, perceivers
were asked to judge the faces according to a single emotion word, which
might have sufficiently constrained their perceptual choices (see later
section on forced choice as an experimental context). Consistent with this
interpretation, a recent study by Phillips, Channon, Tunstall, Hendenstrom,
and Lyons (2008) found that placing participants under working memory load
affected emotion perception judgments far less when the task was to choose
between two labels (as opposed to four or six). Futhermore, perceivers under
cognitive load still show performance decrements compared to when they
are not placed under load (Phillips et al., 2008; Tomasik, Ruthruff, Allen, &
Lien, 2009; Tracy & Robbins, 2008). For example, perceivers under cognitive
load were less able to distinguish perceptually between scowling and smiling
faces (Tomasik et al., 2009). This effect of load appears to be somewhat
downstream in visual processing, however, given that early encoding of
the visual input (indexed by early ERP components) remains intact when
perceivers are placed under cognitive load at encoding (Holmes, Kragh
Neilsen, Tipper, & Green, 2009).

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Affective State
Several studies indicate that a perceiver’s affective state shapes affect
perception. Perceivers induced into an unpleasant affective state, compared
to those feeling neutral, were more likely to see negative emotion in an
ambiguous schematic (line drawing) face (Bouhuys, Bloem, & Groothuis,
1995). In a second study, perceivers in an unpleasant affective state were
more likely to see “fear” in schematic faces that contained both positive
and negative features. In contrast, perceivers in another study (Leppanen
& Hietanen, 2003) who were induced to feel pleasant perceived happiness
in low-intensity smiling faces more quickly than they perceived disgust in
low-intensity disgust faces, although they had roughly equivalent reaction
times to judge happiness and disgust in those faces following induction of
unpleasant feelings. (Because this experiment did not include a neutral
condition, it is unclear whether these were facilitation and interference
effects.) The affective aspects of emotional experiences also shape affect
perception, such that participants induced to feel the discrete state of
disgust via audiotaped messages were more accurate at judging negatively
valenced emotional faces generally (Schiffenbauer, 1974). These effects
on emotion perception appear to be specific to momentary experiences of
affect, however; retrospective ratings of emotion, as measured by the profile
of mood states questionnaire, were unrelated to the perception of emotion
(Harris & Synder, 1992).
The affective state of the perceiver not only influences the emotional content
of what is perceived, but it also influences the dynamics of perception.
Perceivers induced to feel an unpleasant affective state (i.e., sadness)
perceived frowns, but not smiles, as lasting longer than they did, whereas
the reverse finding was found for those induced to feel a pleasant (i.e.,
happy) state (Niedenthal, Halberstadt, Margolin, & Innes-Ker, 2000). Affective
state also shapes how “believable” perceivers find portrayals of emotion.
The experience of positive compared to negative affect leads perceivers to
judge all facial portrayals (i.e., positive, negative, and neutral portrayals)
as more believable (Forgas & East, 2008). Perceived intensity of emotional
faces also appears to be influenced by the affective state of the perceiver.
Participants in a pleasant affective state judged faces portraying positive,
but not negative, emotion as more intense (Forgas & East, 2008). Taken
together, these data indicate that the affective state of the perceiver is
an important factor that contributes to emotion perception. Furthermore,
changes in affective state might be a mechanism by which other context-
based effects occur because odors, sounds, sights, and scenes all might

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shape ongoing perception by virtue of the fact that they have the potential to
perturb a perceiver’s affective state.
Embodiment
Embodiment refers to the various ways in which the body influences
cognition. Embodiment is reflected, for example, in the idea that the brain
systems used to represent the concept of an emotion (e.g., “anger”) are also
involved in seeing that emotion in another person and experiencing that
emotion oneself (Niedenthal, Barsalou, Winkielman, Krauth-Gruber, & Ric,
2005). One implication of this work is that categorizing a face as “anger”
versus “fear” might rely on the perceiver’s ability to reenact the brain
state that controls the relevant facial muscle movements associated with
that emotion (cf. Niedenthal et al., 2005). Studies testing an embodiment
hypothesis have a long history. As early as 1918, it was established
that perceivers reported using facial mimicry as a strategy for emotion
perception (Langfield, 1918b). Perceivers spontaneously mimic facial
muscle movements in static portrayals of emotion (e.g., Dimberg, 1982,
1990) even when they are backwardly masked (Dimberg, Thunberg, &
Elmehed, 2000). More recently, experimental studies have shown that
facial mimicry is associated with perceptual accuracy (Wallbott, 1991), and
with the ability to judge a smile as authentic versus faked (for review, see
Niedenthal, Mermillod, Maringer, & Hess, 2010). Participants allowed to
mimic facial behaviors saw the onset and offset of facial expressions sooner
than participants who were unable to mimic because they were holding a
pen in their mouth (Niedenthal, Brauer, Halberstadt, & Innes-Ker, 2001; see
also Stel & van Knippenberg, 2008). Patients with “locked-in” syndrome,
who have complete paralysis of voluntary (but not spontaneous) facial
movements due to a brainstem lesion, have impaired accuracy for discrete
emotion perception of negative faces (i.e., anger, fear, sadness) (Pistoia et
al., 2010). Yet individuals with Mobius syndrome, who also have paralysis of
facial muscles that results from the underdevelopment of the cranial nerves,
do not show decrements in emotion perception (Rives Bogart & Matsumoto,
2010). These data suggest that central nervous system impairments disrupt
emotion perception, whereas more peripheral causes of muscle impairments
might not. Similarly, a central representation of how a set of facial muscle
movements feels may also be necessary to emotion perception; transcranial
magnetic stimulation (TMS) applied to somatosensory cortex leads to
decrements in emotion perception (Pitcher, Garrido, Walsh, & Duchaine,
2008; see also Adolphs, Damasio, Tranel, Cooper, & Damasio, 2000; Pourtois
et al., 2004). Embodied representations may have particular utility for

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understanding static faces, however, given that an increase in motor cortex
activity was not observed for perception of emotion in dynamic facial
movements (Kilts, Egan, Gideon, Ely, & Hoffman, 2003).
Experimental Context
Even with all the evidence that context routinely influences emotion
perception, there are still experiments where faces are presented in isolation
—no bodies or situational context—and emotion perception still proceeds.
Some of the most well cited studies to make this point date from the early
1970s. This work demonstrated that even individuals from preliterate
cultures have higher accuracy than would be expected by chance when
perceiving emotion in static posed faces (e.g., Ekman & Friesen, 1971;
Ekman et al., 1969, 1972; Izard, 1977). Yet these experiments, arguably
some of the most visible and salient in all of psychology, contain certain
contextual factors in the experimental setup that contributed to emotion
perception in an important way.
Posed Facial Actions
Most studies in the face-focused paradigm (including our own) use faces
that pose particular configurations of muscle movements to portray
emotion instead of spontaneously elicited facial actions. Standard “facial
expression” stimulus sets were created by either directing posers to move
particular facial muscles according to a predetermined configuration (e.g.,
as prescribed by EMFACS) or by merely asking them to pose their faces
to convey a particular emotion category. It is not clear how ecologically
valid these particular configurations are with respect to actual spontaneous
muscle movements during emotion experience (e.g., do people you
know pout when they are sad or scowl when they are angry?). Facial
electromyography, a direct measure of muscle activity, indicates that
people do not always pout in sadness or scowl in anger; in fact, the
electromyography data produce little differentiation beyond positive and
negative affect (for a review, see Cacioppo, Berntson, Larsen, Poehlmann,
& Ito, 2000). Photographs of posed facial actions thus introduce statistical
regularities into emotion perception experiments that are not necessarily
present in real life, and they have the potential to inflate emotion perception
accuracy in the lab compared to what it would be in everyday life (if such
perceptions were only based on a face). In fact, Landis (1924a, 1924b, 1929)
observed that judgments of spontaneous expressions were at chance levels.
More recent work is consistent with (although not as extreme as) these early

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findings (e.g., Yik, Meng, & Russell, 1998), even when the spontaneous facial
actions were identified as emotional by “expert” coders (Naab & Russell,
2007). One argument, of course, is that target people are using display
rules (see Ekman et al., 1969) to modify their spontaneous facial actions,
making it harder to recognize expressions when they occur. To address this
concern, it is instructive to compare emotion perception based on covertly
acquired spontaneous facial actions (acquired in a social context that would
not encourage the use of display rules) with actions that are posed. Accuracy
rates are much lower for covert spontaneous facial actions, although they
are still above chance levels (Hall, Gunnery, & Andrzejewski, 2011; Wagner,
MacDonald, & Manstead, 1986; Zuckerman, Hall, DeFrank, & Rosenthal,
1976). Participants’ accuracy to judge emotion drops even further when the
target’s facial behaviors occurred during conversation (Zuckerman et al.,
1976; also see Motley & Camden, 1988).
In contrast to recognition advantages seen for posed facial actions,
perceivers appear more willing to attribute emotional experience based on
spontaneous expressions. Spontaneous facial actions are judged to convey
emotions more clearly and reflect true feelings more than are posed facial
actions (McLellan, Johnston, Dalrymple-Alford, & Porter, 2010). McLellan and
colleagues also demonstrated that spontaneous facial actions serve as more
effective affective primes than do posed actions. Even though posed facial
actions do well in studies where the question is about the emotion displayed
on the face, spontaneous facial actions appear to do well when the question
is about the experience of the target individual (c.f. Aviezer, Hassin, Bentin,
& Trope, 2008). The ability to explicitly distinguish between posed and
spontaneous expressions (i.e., smiles) appears to be more developed in older
adults, however (Murphy, Lehrfeld, & Isaacowitz, 2010; for review of aging
and context in emotion perception, see Isaacowitz & Stanley, 2011). Future
work should address whether judgments of “true feelings” and priming
effects based on spontaneous stimuli are also enhanced with age.
Static Faces
The face-focused approach to studying emotion perception relies on face
stimuli that are not only posed but also faces that are unmoving or static.
In these stimuli, facial muscle movements are frozen in time with no
temporal dynamics. The static stimulus is often the “apex” of the supposed
expression—the most intense and caricatured instance of facial actions.
Thus, all “sad” faces are pouting; all “angry” faces are frowning; all “happy”
faces are smiling, and so on. When combined with other method choices

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(e.g., forced choice among a small set of words, discussed in the next
subsection), perceivers are able to see the intended emotion with high
accuracy (between 60% and 80%; Keltner et al., 2003, p. 415), and many
scientists have interpreted these findings as evidence that information in the
face is sufficient for emotion perception (e.g., Matsumoto et al., 2008). But
it is important to ask whether the high accuracy rates are, in part, a function
of using static faces. Like posed material, static faces might create statistical
regularities that do not normally exist in the facial actions that are produced
in the real world. Dynamic facial actions contain facial movements that have
their own psychological meaning. Furthermore, a static display extends the
length of an expression’s “apex” beyond its typical duration in dynamic face,
although exposure durations that are meant to mimic brief facial muscle
movements (called “micro expressions”; Ekman & Friesen, 1969) may not do
so.
Unfortunately, it is difficult to assess the consequences of presenting static
compared to dynamic facial actions because there are few studies that
directly compare the two within the same experiment. One study, although
limited in its methods, is suggestive. Perceptions of spontaneous smiles
were compared based on whether the smiles were dynamic or static.
Perceivers had higher accuracy for perceiving happiness in static smiles
than dynamic smiles (Miles & Johnston, 2007). In contrast, when using
artificially constructed (posed) faces, perceivers are more accurate in judging
the emotions conveyed by dynamic facial actions than those depicted in
static faces. This dynamic advantage holds true for judgments based on
video footage of posed facial muscle movements (Ambadar, Schooler, &
Cohn, 2005; Cunningham & Wallraven, 2009, Study 1), for synthetically
created faces (Wehrle, Kaiser, Schmidt, & Scherer, 2000), and even for
point light displays of motion created by facial muscle movements (Bassili,
1979). Developmental data, on the other hand, do not converge with
these findings. Specifically, in preschoolers (3–5 years of age) there is no
documented advantage for the perception of emotion from dynamic versus
static expressions (Nelson & Russell, 2011), suggesting that use of dynamic
cues may require learning that occurs over the lifespan.
In any case, the temporal dynamics of facial actions carry important
information. When the speed of onset is manipulated either by changing
the number of frames in a dynamic display (Kamachi et al., 2001) or the
speed at which the individual frames are presented (Sato & Yoshikawa,
2004), some emotions are more easily perceived with slower onsets (e.g.,
sadness), whereas some (e.g., surprise) are more readily perceived with

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faster onsets. Importantly, this does not appear to be due to the duration
of the “apex” (null findings for manipulating duration of static displays;
Kamachi et al., 2001), but rather the dynamics of how the facial actions
onset.
Emotion Words
Most experiments using a face-focused approach to emotion perception ask
participants to match face stimuli to emotion words that are included as part
of the experimental protocol. These words provide an important but hidden
source of context that shapes emotion perception and increases accuracy
(Barrett, Lindquist, &Gendron, 2007). A number of studies, dating back to the
early years of psychology, provide evidence for the important influence of
words in creating the high accuracy rates we are used to seeing in studies
of emotion perception. Perceivers asked to judge emotion, but not provided
with a list of emotion terms, had very low agreement on the meaning of a set
of facial actions (Kanner, 1931). Providing perceivers with emotion words (vs.
asking perceivers to free label) increases accuracy anywhere from 16% (Kline
& Johannsen, 1935) to 26% (Izard, 1971), on average. Related, providing
any label, even if it is not the correct one, can produce a false consenus in
emotion perception. For example, participants presented with caricatured
illustrations of emotional faces accompanied by incongruent labels tended to
accept the labels as descriptors of the face more often if they previously had
been unable to identify the emotion depicted on the face (Langfield, 1918a).
More recent studies confirm this finding (e.g., Russell, 1993; Widen, Christy,
Hewett, & Russell, 2010; Widen & Russell, 2008). Similarly, when participants
were presented with a list of choices that contained a number of foils,
they had generally low accuracy (Buzby, 1924). One interpretation is that
even posed, static, highly caricatured portrayals of emotion are somewhat
ambiguous as to their psychological meaning, and emotion words can narrow
the range of responses. Thus, any time a study reports high accuracy rates
for emotion perception (in any cue), it is important to consider whether the
experiment explicitly included emotion words that could influence perceivers’
performance (cf. Russell, 1994).
A number of experiments have now demonstrated language effects in
emotion perception when words are not directly introduced as choices in
the experimental paradigm. Emotion words produce biases in perceptual
memory for a face, such that memory is shifted toward words that were
presented at encoding (Halberstadt & Niedenthal, 2001). Furthermore, a
completely false perceptual memory (i.e., remembering a smile) can be

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created based on a context that primes a specific semantic category (e.g.,
wining a sporting event) (Fernández-Dols, Carrera, Barchard, & Gacitua,
2008). Words also support categorical perception of facial expressions
(Fugate, Gouzoules, & Barrett, 2010). Perceivers learned chimpanzee
expressions (e.g., a hoot) either with an arbitrary label or without. Only those
perceivers who learned the expressions with labels showed the hallmark of
categorical perception—an advantage at discriminating morphs that crossed
the categorical boundary between two expressions.
Emotion perception can be impaired by reducing the accessibility of
emotion words, even when such words are not necessary to perform the
experimental task. When emotion word meaning is made less accessible by
semantic satiation
6
(for a review, see Black, 2003), accuracy on a perceptual
matching task drops to just above chance levels (even though emotion
words are not necessary to say whether two faces match in their emotional
content; Lindquist, Barrett, Bliss-Moreau, & Russell, 2006). Furthermore,
when participants are placed under verbal load categorical perception for
posed, caricatured faces is wiped out (such that perceptual advantages for
distinguishing between stimuli from two different emotion categories is no
longer observed) (Roberson, Damjanovic, & Pilling, 2007). Given these data,
it is difficult to conclude that the structural features of expressions drive
categorical perception all by themselves.
Words also provide an advantage to young children’s emotion perception.
Specifically, young children are more accurate at matching emotional faces
in a sorting task when the box they are sorting into is marked by a word,
compared to when it is marked with a perceptually similar face (Russell
& Widen, 2002).
7
Furthermore, emotion perception accuracy increases in
parallel with children’s vocabulary for emotion words (for a review of this
work, see Widen & Russell, 2008). For example, in Widen and Russell’s work,
children acquire the term “disgust” relatively late, at a mean age of 56
months (4.6 years) and only around this time do children distinguish between
high arousal fear and disgust portrayals.
Finally, the neural representation of an emotional face is also shaped by
emotion words. Providing perceivers with emotion words significantly
reduced amygdala response to posed faces depicting emotion (Lieberman
et al., 2007). This result is likely due to the reduced uncertainty produced
by helping to resolve competing “perceptual hypotheses” that arose from a
structural analysis of the face alone. Furthermore, when perceivers judged
a structurally neutral face as emotional, this engaged a network of regions

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(e.g., right superior temporal sulcus, bilateral orbitofrontal cortex, right
anterior insula) (Thieschler & Pessoa, 2007) that are typically thought of as
the distributed network for emotional face perception (Haxby, Hoffman, &
Gobbini, 2000). In addition, evidence from a neural adaptation paradigm
suggests that the representation of emotional faces, within this same neural
network, is driven by perceiver conceptualization (i.e., judgments of the
emotion category) rather than by structural features of the face alone (Fox,
Moon, Iaria, & Barton, 2009). Even when repeated stimuli are changed so
drastically that they are “perceptually” drawn from a different category,
and theoretically should release the brain from adaptation (i.e., neural
responses should go back up because the perceptual aspects of the stimuli
have changed), they fail to do so when perceivers judge that the emotion
category has not changed. Plainly, the neural representation of an emotional
face involves conceptual processing and is not determined by the stimulus
features of a face alone. The role of language in emotion perception is also
evident in a meta-analysis comparing brain activity during the perception
and experience of emotion; the analysis consistently showed activation in
language-related regions, including inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), extending
from the pars opercularis (Broca’s area, BA 44) through pars triangularis (BA
45) and pars orbitalis on the inferior frontal convexity (BA 47/12 l) (Wager et
al., 2008).
Taken together, these studies indicate that emotion words (regardless of
whether they are offered) constrain how people understand the psychological
meaning of a face, even if that face is posing an intense, stereotyped set
of muscle actions. Words provide a context that contributes to emotion
perception and increases accuracy. In some ways, this is unsurprising, given
how powerful words are in the economy of the mind (e.g., Mani & Plunkett,
2010).
Repeated Measures
A final form of context that is embedded in nearly all investigations of
emotion perception is the use of a small set of faces presented repeatedly
to the perceiver. This repetition allows (and perhaps encourages) perceivers
to form ad hoc perceptual categories by extracting statistical regularities
from these posed faces (e.g., all angry faces are scowling, all sad faces
are pouting, all happy faces are smiling, and so on).
8
Indeed, attaching a
label to an emotional face in an explicit emotion perception task may help
overcome perceptual variation and support category formation as is seen for
other types of stimuli (see Lupyan, Rakison, & McClelland, 2007). A careful

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look suggests that repeating faces over and over creates a strong form of
experiment-based context in the face-focused approach to understanding
emotion perception. For example, research investigating the impact of
training on emotion perception indicates that participants demonstrate
substantial accuracy increases (Guilford, 1929). These training effects are
greater for more unfamiliar stimuli, such as faces portraying emotion posed
by someone from another cultural group (Elfenbein, 2006).
Conclusions
To understand how humans perceive emotion, we must focus our research
efforts on more than just the face. People rarely pose their faces into
predetermined configurations when in an emotional state, and even when
they do, facial actions often are moving targets, embedded in other facial
actions, as well as the body movements, smells, and vocalizations that
occur during conversation and other cognitively taxing events. In addition,
other factors appear crucial to perceivers’ emotion perception, including
knowledge of the situation and their own internal state. And in the context
of laboratory experiments, it is clear that scientists do many things that
serve to contextualize emotion perception, often in ways that are unlike what
occurs in everyday life.
Nevertheless, it is reasonable to ask what the face alone can tell us about
a person’s emotional state. Unfortunately, the published literature does
not really answer this question because the experiments themselves
usually contain hidden forms of context that contribute to emotion
perception accuracy. The handful of studies that have attempted to strip
away experimental forms of context from the face, with more or less
success, almost always show notable decreases in accuracy. Most of these
experiments remove only one form of experimental context, leaving the
others intact. It is important to remember that every experiment involves
some context, even if it is unintended by the experimenter.
More broadly, the context in which emotion perception unfolds might
help explain how perceivers can routinely, and with little effort, perceive
when another person is angry or afraid, despite the fact that the objective
measures of the face (e.g., electromyographic measurements) and voice
(e.g., acoustical measures) fail to reveal diagnostic patterns for each emotion
(Barrett, 2006a). Barrett (2006b) has termed this the “Emotion Paradox”:
Instrument-based measures of the face do not reveal muscle movements
that distinguish discrete emotions (Cacioppo et al., 2000; Mauss & Rpbinson,
2009), yet perceivers can readily look at someone’s face and judge how

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that person is feeling. One hypothesis to solve the emotion paradox is
that perceivers initially extract affective information from a face (whether
to approach or avoid it, for example) and the context activates more
nuanced conceptual knowledge that allows for the construction of discrete
emotion percept of anger, sadness, or fear (for a similar view, see Roberson,
Damjanovic, & Kikutani, 2010). The various forms of context reviewed in
this chapter might help to shape broadly “affective” actions into discrete
emotional percepts. Consistent with this hypothesis, perceivers routinely
encode and remember the context better when they are asked to judge the
emotion in a face than to judge whether to approach or avoid it (Barrett &
Kensinger, 2010). Furthermore, the more readily a situation points to a single
emotion category, the stronger its impact on subsequent emotion perception
from the face (Fernández-Dols et al., 1991). As such, it might be that the
forms of “context” reviewed here are vital to emotion perception as a highly
constructive process.
Whatever the mechanisms by which context shapes emotion perception, the
findings reviewed here should prompt us to reconsider long-held assumptions
about emotion perception. They also suggest that we should question the
experimental paradigms that dominate research based on these long-held
assumptions. The field of emotion perception seems firmly rooted in the idea
that a static, posed face is a useful cue for us to model the perception of
discrete emotional states such as anger and sadness. The present review,
in contrast, suggests that the face may not be “figure” and the context
merely “ground.” After all, the epistemic goal in emotion perception in
everyday life is not to determine what a face is displaying. The goal, instead,
is to determine what the person is experiencing, based on whatever is
most information relevant at the time. Thus, the processing of “context”
is not a secondary consideration, but instead is routine when the goal is
to understand the emotion that another person is experiencing (Barrett &
Kensinger, 2010).
As perceivers, we are drawn to faces. Our attention rests on them. It is
therefore no accident that scientists assume that faces must be the key
source of information in emotion perception. To be sure, faces convey
important psychological information, but they very likely do not provide
sufficient information to a person’s emotional state (especially if the person
himself or herself is using the context to construct that state; Barrett,
2006a, 2009). Future research that addresses emotion perception as a
contextualized phenomenon will help build our understanding of how people

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see emotions in other people, and how they use those perceptions to get
along and get ahead in the world.
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Notes:
(1.) The use of the forced-choice method has recently been extended to
studies testing the sufficiency of nonverbal emotional vocalizations as cues
to discrete emotion (Sauter, Eisner, Ekman, & Scott, 2009; Simon-Thomas et
al., 2009) and has been used in studies examining whether posture/bodily
movements convey discrete emotion to perceivers (e.g., Coulson, 2004;
De Silva & Bianchi-Berthouze, 2004; Ekman, 1965; Ekman & Friesen, 1967;
Pitterman & Nowicki, 2004; Schouwstra & Hoogstraten, 1995).
(2.) “Affect” versus “emotion” perception must be distinguished. This
distinction rests on the judgment that perceivers are asked to make. When
a perceiver is asked to judge the discrete emotion content of a face, for
example, “Is this face angry?” the task is typically assumed to be an emotion
perception. If, however, the perceiver is asked to make a judgment about
how intense, positive/negative, aroused/unaroused a target person is,
or whether to approach/avoid that target person, the task is categorized
as affect perception. Nonetheless, it is often the case that effects are
interpreted as emotion perception when they might, in fact, be affect
perception. For example, presenting a facial depiction of “anger” within a
“happy” context is incongruent both in terms of discrete emotion categories
and also in terms of valence. Likewise, facilitation due to pairing a a scowling
face with an anger-inducing situational description might be due merely to
the affective value of the context instead of the match on discrete emotion
category (if the effect is defined by comparing perception of the face in
the absence of context or in a neutral context). Similarly, studies that
compare the perception of started “fear” faces to neutral faces, or “happy”
faces to “sad” faces, might be studies of affect (valence) perception rather
than studies of emotion perception per se. A similar point can be made for
comparisons of “fear” faces to “sad” faces because they differ in affective
arousal.
(3.) There are additional data to suggest that context effects extend in the
other direction: Facial behaviors serve as a context to emotion perception
based on vocal cues (e.g., de Gelder, Böcker, Tuomainen, Hensen, &
Vroomen, 1999; de Gelder, Pourtois, & Weiskrantz, 2002; de Gelder &
Vroomen, 2000; Pourtois, de Gelder, Vroomen, Rossion, & Crommelinck,

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2000; Pourtois, Debatisse, Despland, & de Gelder, 2002; Vroomen, Driver,
& de Gelder, 2001). Furthermore, the influence of facial behaviors on
the perception of emotion in the voice is maintained under a dual task,
suggesting this effect is not dependent on attentional resources (Vroomen et
al., 2001).
(4.) There are some data to suggest that these two sources of information
can be integrated even earlier. When facial behaviors serve as a context
for vocal cues, integration appears to occur very rapidly. For example,
a mismatch negativity at 178 ms was detected for prosody following an
incongruent face portraying emotion (de Gelder et al., 1999). When facial
and vocal stimuli were presented simultaneously and were congruent, an
enhancement of the N1 was demonstrated at 110 ms after onset (Pourtois et
al., 2000). One possibility is that the time course of integration depends on
which cue, face or voice, is the “object” of perception.
(5.) Interestingly, the Nakamura et al. (1990) paper is typically cited as some
of the best evidence that the face is a stronger cue to emotion than is the
situational context because the researchers matched each in its source
clarity (i.e., the extent to which perceivers thought the cue was associated
with a single emotion). Yet this research strikingly only looked at contexts
and situations that differed in valence (e.g., a “pleasant” face paired with an
“unpleasant” slide) so that a much more limited interpretation is warranted:
situations fail to override facial information that differs in valence (although
other work shows that bodies with props can over-ride valence; Aviezer et al.,
2008, Study 2).
(6.) In semantic satiation, on a given trial, participants repeat a word 30
times (as compared to the typical control condition where they repeat the
word three times). The massive repetition of the word produces a temporary
functional equivalent of semantic dementia (characterized by impairments in
the semantic representation of words).
(7.) Recent data suggest that the face can still be a relatively effective cue
to a discrete emotion label. When young children (ages 2–4, a younger
sample than the 2002 sample demonstrating the label superiority effect) are
asked to generate a label in response to a face or a description of a cause
or consequence for emotion, for some categories, faces were a better cue
to the emotion label (Widen & Russell, 2010). These data suggest that facial
actions may be one of the first types of content that “populate” emotion
categories, perhaps given their relatively concrete nature.

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(8.) In real life, it is unclear whether people routinely scowl when they are
angry, or pout when they are sad, and so it is unclear whether emotion
categories are, in fact, perceptual categories (cf. Barrett, 2006a; see also
Mauss & Robinson, 2009).