Emotional contextual effects of face perception: a test of the affective realism hypothesis

Abstract

Affective feelings naturally infuse individuals’ perceptions, serving as valid windows onto the real world. The affective realism hypothesis further explains how these feelings work: as properties of individuals’ perceptual experiences, these feelings influence perception. Notably, this hypothesis based on affective feelings with different valences has been substantiated, whereas the existing evidence is not compelling enough. Moreover, whether specific affective feelings can be experienced as properties of target perception remains unclear. Addressing these two issues deepens our understanding of the nature of emotional representation. Hence, we investigated the affective realism hypothesis based on affective feelings with different valences and specific emotions, comparing it with the affective misattribution hypothesis. In Experiment 1, we examined the effects of affective feelings with various valences on targets’ perception through the AM (1a) and CFS paradigms (1b). In Experiment 2, we investigated the effects of affective feelings with anger, sadness, and disgust using similar methods. Results from Experiments 1a and 1b consistently indicated significant differences in valence ratings of neutral faces under emotional contexts with varying valences. Experiment 2a revealed significant differences in specific emotion ratings of neutral faces under different specific emotional contexts in the AM paradigm, whereas such differences were not observed in the CFS paradigm in Experiment 2b. We concluded that affective feelings with different valences, rather than specific emotions, can be experienced as inherent properties of target perception, validating the affective realism hypothesis. These findings supported the view that the nature of emotional representation should be described as affective dimensions.

Keywords:

• Affective misattribution hypothesis
• affective realism hypothesis
• emotion
• emotional representation
• face perception
• neutral face

Author contributions

YG, WL and LM conceptualized the study and designed the experiments. YG wrote the main manuscript and analyzed the data. YG, WL, JL, YC, CX and LM revised the manuscript. YG, WL,YC and LM interpreted the results. YG, JL and JC conducted the experiments. All authors have read and approved the content of manuscript.

Ethical approval

The procedure in this study was approved by the ethical review board of the School of Psychology, South China Normal University.

Informed consent

Written informed consent was obtained from all of the participants, and the study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of South China Normal University. All of the study procedures involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the Institutional Review Board of South China Normal University and with the Declaration of Helsinki 1964 and its later amendments or comparable ethical.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interests.

Data availability statement

The datasets generated and analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding authors on reasonable request.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by grants from the MOE Project of Key Research Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences in Universities (Grant Number: 22JJD190008), the Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation (2021A1515011259), the Science and Technology Projects in Guangzhou (202201010626) and the Scientific Research Innovation Project of Graduate School of South China Normal University (2024KYLX004).