The most familiar emotional signals consist of faces, voices, and whole-body expressions, but so far research on emotions expressed by the whole body is sparse. The authors investigated recognition of whole-body expressions of emotion in three experiments. In the first experiment, participants performed a body expression-matching task. Results indicate good recognition of all emotions, with fear being the hardest to recognize. In the second experiment, two alternative forced choice categorizations of the facial expression of a compound face-body stimulus were strongly influenced by the bodily expression. This effect was a function of the ambiguity of the facial expression. In the third experiment, recognition of emotional tone of voice was similarly influenced by task irrelevant emotional body expressions. Taken together, the findings illustrate the importance of emotional whole-body expressions in communication either when viewed on their own or, as is often the case in realistic circumstances, in combination with facial expressions and emotional voices.

Electrophysiological and hemodynamic correlates of processing isolated faces have been investigated extensively over the last decade. A question not addressed thus far is whether the visual scene, which normally surrounds a face or a facial expression, has an influence on how the face is processed. Here we investigated this issue by presenting faces in natural contexts and measuring whether the emotional content of the scene influences processing of a facial expression. Event-related potentials were recorded to faces (fearful/neutral) embedded in scene contexts (fearful/neutral) while participants performed an orientation-decision task (face upright or inverted). Two additional experiments were run, one to examine the effects of context that occur without a face and the other to evaluate the effects of faces isolated from contexts. Faces without any context showed the largest N170 amplitudes. The presence of a face in a fearful context enhances the N170 amplitude over a face in neutral contexts, an effect that is strongest for fearful faces on left occipito-temporal sites. This N170 effect, and the corresponding topographic distribution, was not found for contexts-only, indicating that the increased N170 amplitude results from the combination of face and fearful context. These findings suggest that the context in which a face appears may influence how it is encoded.

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In daily life, we perceive a person's facial reaction as part of the natural environment surrounding it. Because most studies have investigated how facial expressions are recognized by using isolated faces, it is unclear what role the context plays. Although it has been observed that the N170 for facial expressions is modulated by the emotional context, it was not clear whether individuals use context information on this stage of processing to discriminate between facial expressions. The aim of the present study was to investigate how the early stages of face processing are affected by emotional scenes when explicit categorizations of fearful and happy facial expressions are made. Emotion effects were found for the N170, with larger amplitudes for faces in fearful scenes as compared to faces in happy and neutral scenes. Critically, N170 amplitudes were significantly increased for fearful faces in fearful scenes as compared to fearful faces in happy scenes and expressed in left-occipito-temporal scalp topography differences. Our results show that the information provided by the facial expression is combined with the scene context during the early stages of face processing.