Event Abstract Back to Event The influence of context on emotional face processing Charlotte Sinke1* and Beatrice De-Gelder1 1 University of Tilburg, Netherlands Humans rapidly recognize and understand facial expressions of others, as shown by numerous behavioral and neuroimaging studies. An important factor that may influence this recognition process is the context in which the face is perceived. Affective scenes have already shown to influence an ERP component (the N170) of facial expressions, indicating that the face is already at an early stage encoded differently in an affective context. We wanted to further explore these context effects using functional magnetic resonance imaging. We tried to investigate the influence of either a congruent or incongruent scene on the neuronal processing of fearful and neutral faces. Fourteen participants were being scanned while they were shown photographs (248 trials) of either a fearful or a neutral face in a fearful, neutral or scrambled scene. To stay focused, they had to respond to an oddball, being an inverted stimulus. All bodies were replaced with the same black body-like shape for all identities and emotions, so no information could be extracted from this. The experiment consisted of four runs of 31 blocks. Eight stimuli were presented per block for 800 ms with an interval of 350 ms. Also, a functional localizer for the perception of faces, bodies, houses and tools was used. Our results show that activity in brain areas that are associated with perception of faces or perception of scenes, are influenced by the emotional information conveyed by the respective stimuli. Conference: 41st European Brain and Behaviour Society Meeting, Rhodes Island, Greece, 13 Sep - 18 Sep, 2009. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Poster presentations Citation: Sinke C and De-Gelder B (2009). The influence of context on emotional face processing. Conference Abstract: 41st European Brain and Behaviour Society Meeting. doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.08.2009.09.303 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 15 Jun 2009; Published Online: 15 Jun 2009. * Correspondence: Charlotte Sinke, University of Tilburg, 6200 MD Maastricht, Netherlands, c.b.a.sinke@uvt.nl Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Charlotte Sinke Beatrice De-Gelder Google Charlotte Sinke Beatrice De-Gelder Google Scholar Charlotte Sinke Beatrice De-Gelder PubMed Charlotte Sinke Beatrice De-Gelder Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.