Perceiving facial emotions in context: The intertwined roles of emotional valence and consciousness.
Yujie Chen, Yi Jiang, Ying Wang
Emotion August 25, 2025 DOI: 10.1037/emo0001581 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Psychophysical experiment Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Sample size | 160 |
| Population | Healthy Asian college students |
| Keywords | Humans Facial expression Emotions Consciousness Social perception Adolescent Female Young adult Facial recognition |
| Key findings | Emotional facial context alone biased perception of an ambiguous target face. Happy contextual faces shifted emotion perception regardless of whether observers were aware of them, whereas fearful contextual faces did so only when not consciously perceived, indicating a dissociation between nonconscious and conscious processing. The authors argue this shows emotional valence and consciousness jointly shape affective context effects on facial emotion perception. |
Abstract
Facial emotion perception in real life is inevitably influenced by the affective context, such as the expressions on nearby people's faces. However, to what extent and how the expressions of others exert a contextual influence on our interpretation of target facial emotions remains largely unclear. Using psychophysical methods, we demonstrated that the emotional facial context alone (i.e., without any evident social interaction cues) is sufficient to bias the perceived expression of an ambiguous target face (N = 160, healthy Asian college students, 2017-2025). Intriguingly, the contextual effect induced by faces with fearful, but not happy, expressions was regulated by observers' awareness of the context. For fearful contexts, the contextual effect showed a dissociation between nonconscious and conscious conditions, occurring only when the contextual face was not consciously perceived. By contrast, contextual faces expressing happiness biased emotion perception regardless of awareness. These findings broaden our understanding of the affective contextual effect in situations without explicit social relationships. More crucially, they unveil the intertwined roles of emotional valence and consciousness in emotional information integration, offering valuable insights into the intricate mechanisms whereby affective context shapes facial emotion perception. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).