Abstract

Emotion words or emotional faces presented before a person's facial expressions can be used as contextual information to identify that person's emotion. Using a psychophysical method, we compared the context modulation effects of emotional words and faces on emotion judgment of the target faces. We presented emotion words (“happiness”, “anger”) or emotional faces (typical happy and angry face) as context, and then participants performed a two alternative forced choice task (2-AFC) to determine the emotion of the target face of which emotion was gradually morphed from happiness to anger. As a result of two experiments with different context presentation times (Experiment 1: 200 ms, Experiment 2: 1500 ms), the emotional word context induced an assimilation context modulation effect that shifts the emotion judgment threshold in a direction consistent with the context emotion regardless of the presentation time. On the other hand, the facial expression context induced a contrasting context-regulating effect that shifted the judgment threshold in the opposite direction to the contextual emotion. At this time, the context modulation effect of happy expression and anger expression was affected by the presentation time. When the context duration was short (200ms), only contrastive effect of happy face was observed, whereas when the context duration was long enough (1500ms), both contrastive effect of the happy and angry face were observed. The results of this study imply that emotional words as context activate emotional concepts, whereas facial expressions activate structural information, which can lead to different contextual effects on the emotional perception of subsequent facial expressions.