Abstract:
Facial emotion recognition is inherently contextualized and may automatically incorporate affective information from the context. Here we investigate whether this affective contextual effect is modulated by a prominent social cue, namely, the gaze direction of the contextualized emotional face. We demonstrate that the perceived emotional expression of a visible target face is biased toward the emotion of an invisible contextual face, with this nonconscious affective contextual modulation dependent on the gaze direction of the target face. In particular, a target face gazing toward a contextual face induced a larger affective contextual effect than a face gazing away. Furthermore, this gaze modulation effect specifically occurred for invisible fearful contexts and hinged on individual trait anxiety levels. These findings show that social information delivered by gaze cues can modulate the fear-specific affective contextual effect without awareness, shedding new light on how compound socio-affective signals are automatically integrated into our perception of others\' emotions.
摘要:
面部情感识别固有地被情境化,并且可以自动地结合来自情境的情感信息。在这里,我们调查这种情感语境效应是否受到突出的社会线索的调节,即,语境化的情感面孔的注视方向。我们证明,可见目标面孔的感知情感表达偏向于不可见上下文面孔的情感,这种无意识的情感语境调制取决于目标面部的注视方向。特别是,目标面部凝视上下文面部比凝视面部引起更大的情感上下文效果。此外,这种凝视调节效应特别发生在看不见的恐惧环境中,并取决于个体特质焦虑水平。这些发现表明,通过凝视线索传递的社会信息可以在没有意识的情况下调节恐惧特定的情感语境效应,揭示了复合社会情感信号如何自动融入我们对他人情绪的感知。