Abstract
We receive emotional signals from different sources, including the face, the whole body, and the natural scene. Previous research has shown the importance of context provided by the whole body and the scene on the recognition of facial expressions. This study measured physiological responses to face-body-scene combinations. Participants freely viewed emotionally congruent and incongruent face-body and body-scene pairs whilst eye fixations, pupil-size, and electromyography (EMG) responses were recorded. Participants attended more to angry and fearful vs. happy or neutral cues, independent of the source and relatively independent from whether the face body and body scene combinations were emotionally congruent or not. Moreover, angry faces combined with angry bodies and angry bodies viewed in aggressive social scenes elicited greatest pupil dilation. Participants' face expressions matched the valence of the stimuli but when face-body compounds were shown, the observed facial expression influenced EMG responses more than the posture. Together, our results show that the perception of emotional signals from faces, bodies and scenes depends on the natural context, but when threatening cues are presented, these threats attract attention, induce arousal, and evoke congruent facial reactions.
Highlights
Imagine a man approaches you while holding up his fists, his muscles tensed
The present study aims to investigate two questions: 1. How are face and body expressions processed when presented simultaneously? Is a face looked at differently, depending on the body expression and vice-versa? Will the face expression and the level of arousal of the participant change as a function of the various emotional signals he observes in the face and body?
We investigated the perception of emotional expressions using naturalistic stimuli consisting of whole body expressions and scenes
Summary
Imagine a man approaches you while holding up his fists, his muscles tensed. Such an emotional signal is experienced differently in the context of a sports event than in a narrow street in the middle of the night. More recent studies have shown that our recognition of a facial expression is influenced by the body expression (Meeren et al, 2005; Van den Stock et al, 2007; Kret and de Gelder, 2013; Kret et al, 2013) and by the surrounding scene i.e., context (Righart and de Gelder, 2006, 2008a,b; Kret and de Gelder, 2012a). The goal of the current study is to examine how the presence of multiple emotional signals consisting of a simultaneously presented face and body expression, or a body expression situated in an emotional scene, are perceived by investigating the physiological correlates in a naturalistic passive-viewing situation
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