Abstract

Contextual effects on emotion recognition have been well evidenced on various contextual stimuli. However, previous studies mostly focused on facial expressions. Although the facial expressions are important cue in emotional communication, bodily expressions are also one of the fundamental sources of emotional information especially when faces are hard to recognize. The present study examined contextual effects on emotional processing of the bodily expression. Given that the bodily expressions are inseparable from the facial expression, we aimed to examine contextual effects of faces on bodily expression. For bodily expression, we used point-light biological motion(BM) that depicts human movement and convey emotional information. In the affective priming paradigm, emotionally neutral BMs were presented as targets following the prime which was either happy, angry, or neutral face. To compare with the emotional processing of faces, the same experiment but with neutral face target was additionally conducted. Participants were told to rate emotional valence of the targets. The results showed that both the BM and face targets were affected by priming effects. Notably, the effects were much greater on BM than the face targets, indicating that BM was more influenced by contextual emotion. These suggest that BM perception may need greater integration of the emotional contextual information possibly due to insufficient its own emotional information compared to faces. To summarize, the present study newly revealed the affective contextual effect of facial expression on BM, and identified distinct property of emotional valence convey by BM compared with facial expressions.