Abstract
Building on the notion that processing of emotional stimuli is sensitive to context, in two experimental tasks we explored whether the detection of emotion in emotional words (task 1) and facial expressions (task 2) is facilitated by social verbal context. Three different levels of contextual supporting information were compared, namely (1) no information, (2) the verbal expression of an emotionally matched word pronounced with a neutral intonation, and (3) the verbal expression of an emotionally matched word pronounced with emotionally matched intonation. We found that increasing levels of supporting contextual information enhanced emotion detection for words, but not for facial expressions. We also measured activity of the corrugator and zygomaticus muscle to assess facial simulation, as processing of emotional stimuli can be facilitated by facial simulation. While facial simulation emerged for facial expressions, the level of contextual supporting information did not qualify this effect. All in all, our findings suggest that adding emotional-relevant voice elements positively influence emotion detection.
Highlights
A considerable part of peoples’ everyday lives consists of accurately grasping emotion-related information
Social interaction involves emotional facial expressions that can reveal the emotional states of interaction partners
The current study included two tasks to assess the role of contextually supportive elements of a voice—word and intonation- in accurately detecting emotion-related information in written emotion-related words and in facial expressions, relating to two common forms in which people encounter affective information in everyday life
Summary
A considerable part of peoples’ everyday lives consists of accurately grasping emotion-related information. A study by Rigoulot and Pell (2014) showed that vocal emotion cues influence the way in which people visually scan and process facial expressions They presented participants with facial expressions that were accompanied by either congruent or incongruent affective prosody, which consisted of non-sensical sentences. In the case of visual perception of target information pertaining to written words and facial expressions in the presence of others, it is important to examine how auditory verbal cues, such as emotion-matched words and intonation of an accompanying voice enhance the accurate detection of the emotionality of the target information. The present study was set out to test this systematically by assessing the contribution of each contextually supporting element of a voice (word and intonation) to the accurate detection of emotion-related target information. In the current study we explored whether this simulation process might depend on the amount of emotion supporting contextual information one has when processing emotion words and emotional facial expressions
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