The majority of emotion perception studies utilize instructed and stereotypical expressions of faces or bodies. While such stimuli are highly standardized and well-recognized, their resemblance to real-life expressions of emotion remains unknown. Here we examined facial and body expressions of fear and anger during real-life situations and compared their recognition to that of instructed expressions of the same emotions. In order to examine the source of the affective signal, expressions of emotion were presented as faces alone, bodies alone, and naturally, as faces with bodies. The results demonstrated striking deviations between recognition of instructed and real-life stimuli, which differed as a function of the emotion expressed. In real-life fearful expressions of emotion, bodies were far better recognized than faces, a pattern not found with instructed expressions of emotion. Anger reactions were better recognized from the body than from the face in both real-life and instructed stimuli. However, the real-life stimuli were overall better recognized than their instructed counterparts. These results indicate that differences between instructed and real-life expressions of emotion are prevalent and raise caution against an overreliance of researchers on instructed affective stimuli. The findings also demonstrate that in real life, facial expression perception may rely heavily on information from the contextualizing body. (PsycINFO Database Record
The social context -seeing people emotionally interacting -is one of the most common contexts in which emotion perception occurs. Despite its importance, emotion perception of social interactions from a 3rd-person perspective is poorly understood. Here we investigated whether emotion recognition of fear and anger is facilitated by mere congruency (the contextual figure exhibits the same emotion as the target) or by functional relations (the contextual figure exhibits a complementary emotion to the target). Furthermore, we examined which expression channel, face or body, drives social context effects. In the 1st 2 experiments (Studies 1a and 1b), participants in an online survey platform (N ϭ 146) or university students (N ϭ 34), viewed interacting figures displaying fear or anger, presented either as faces, bodies, or both. Participants were instructed to categorize the target figure's emotions while the other figure served as context. Results showed that fear recognition was facilitated by an interacting angry figure more strongly than by an interacting fearful figure. Moreover, this effect occurred when participants viewed the figures' bodies (with or without the faces), but not when they viewed the figures' faces alone. A 3rd online experiment (Study 2) established that this context effect was stronger when participants (N ϭ 464) watched the figures interacting (facing each other) than when figures were not interacting (facing away from each other), suggesting that social context influences emotion perception by revealing the interactants' relation. Our findings demonstrate that emotional perception is grounded in the broader process of social interaction and highlight the role of the body in interpersonal context effects.
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