Early integration of affectively contextual information when processing low-intensity fearful faces: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence

Abstract

In daily social situations, faces rarely appear in isolation and are often contextual. This study investigated individuals' behavioral and neural responses to facial expressions with different intensities embedded in emotional scenes. Participants were presented with neutral, low-intensity, and prototypical fearful expressions embedded in positive and negative scenes and instructed to categorize the facial expressions as neutral or fearful. The behavioral results showed that neutral and low-intensity fearful expressions embedded in negative scenes were rated as fearful significantly more frequently than the same faces embedded in positive scenes. Event-related potential analyses revealed the time course of the integration of contextual information when processing facial expressions. N170 modulation by scene valence was found for low-intensity and prototypical fearful expressions, showing greater N170 elicited by negative than positive scenes. The results suggest that affective information extracted from contextual scenes influences the processing of facial emotions in the early perceptual encoding stage. Furthermore, the pattern of effect varies for different intensities of expressions.