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.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion perception
• facial expression
• body posture
• automaticity
• ambiguity

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Ege University Planning and Monitoring Coordination of Organizational Development and Directorate of Library and Documentation for their support in editing and proofreading service of this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 To determine required sample size, a power analysis was conducted using MorePower 6.0.4 (Campbell & Thompson, 2012), and it revealed that 20 participants for large effect size and 48 participants for medium effect size would be required to achieve.90 statistical power and 95% confidence interval.

2 The log file showed that face-body pairs at the priming stage were presented as 33 ms (±2 ms) as planned.

3 As it was mentioned in the “participants” section above.

4 To reduce the probability of chance-based correct response, the neutral stimuli in the experiment were used as fillers. Accordingly, the neutral condition was omitted from the analysis as it is not relevant to the purpose of the study.

5 To determine required sample size, a power analysis was conducted using MorePower 6.0.4 (Campbell & Thompson, 2012), and it revealed that 16 participants for large effect size and 36 participants for medium effect size would be required to achieve.90 statistical power and 95% confidence interval.

6 Neutral stimuli were not used in this experiment as they were unrelated for experimental purposes. Thus, it prevents the decrease in the number of stimuli per condition.