The role of the context in identifying non-stereotypical emotional faces: The modulation of task instruction

Perceiving an emotion from a face has long been thought to be a simple process. Early studies report specific facial muscle movements for specific emotions. Hence, a scowl would always mean one is angry and a smile would always mean one is happy. However, more recent evidence has found that perceiving an emotion from a face does not rely on facial muscle movements alone. Rather, a face is perceived in relation to a complex set of factors, including its environment. This present study aims to investigate whether individuals use contextual information in perceiving non-stereotypical happy and fearful facial expressions. In particular, we aimed to explore whether contextual information is used in facial emotional processing only when participants are required to do it (as already demonstrated in the previous studies) or also when they are required to ignore it. Overall, the results showed that participants used contextual information in evaluating both happy and fearful faces irrespective of which instructions were given. Indeed, even when participants were told to ignore the positive or negative contextual information, they made use of these context in perceiving the presented faces. In conclusion, context had a strong influence on how emotions were perceived and categorized. Keywords: facial expressions, context, display, emotions, congruency, instruction