Does body context affect facial emotion perception and eliminate emotional ambiguity without visual awareness?

Abstract

In this study, we hypothesized that the emotional cues of conveyer’s body posture play a role in eliminating ambiguity of facial expressions. The participants were presented with faces with emotionally congruent and incongruent body posture or without a posture (no-context) for a brief time (33 ms) in Experiment 1. The results showed that congruent pairs led to higher accuracy of facial emotion perception compared with incongruent pairs and no-context condition. On the other hand, angry, sad and disgusted emotional facial expressions were blended to create emotional ambiguity in Experiment 2, and the results partially supported the hypotheses where the context effect emerged in ambiguous anger–disgust morphs but not in unambiguous facial expressions. Thus, incongruent emotional cues in body posture have an interfering effect on the perception of emotional facial expression without awareness.