Affective theory of mind inferences contextually influence the recognition of emotional facial expressions

ABSTRACT

The recognition of emotional facial expressions is often subject to contextual influence, particularly when the face and the context convey similar emotions. We investigated whether spontaneous, incidental affective theory of mind inferences made while reading vignettes describing social situations would produce context effects on the identification of same-valenced emotions (Experiment 1) as well as differently-valenced emotions (Experiment 2) conveyed by subsequently presented faces. Crucially, we found an effect of context on reaction times in both experiments while, in line with previous work, we found evidence for a context effect on accuracy only in Experiment 1. This demonstrates that affective theory of mind inferences made at the pragmatic level of a text can automatically, contextually influence the perceptual processing of emotional facial expressions in a separate task even when those emotions are of a distinctive valence. Thus, our novel findings suggest that language acts as a contextual influence to the recognition of emotional facial expressions for both same and different valences.

KEYWORDS:

• Theory of mind
• inference
• emotion
• context
• face processing

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Dr Simon de Deyne for sharing the Small World of Words free association English data.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest.

ORCID

Suzanne L. K. Stewart http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2152-0091

Astrid Schepman http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7407-362X

Matthew Haigh http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1549-697X

Andrew J. Stewart http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9795-4104

Notes

1. See online supplemental material for detailed descriptions of the vignette development for both experiments.

2. The same pattern of results is found with a 2 × 2 ANOVA.

3. See the online supplemental material for a description of the vignettes’ development.

4. The same pattern of results is found with a 2 × 2 ANOVA.

5. One possible alternative explanation is that certain words in the vignettes primed the emotion word response options at a lexical level. We re-ran the analyses excluding vignettes that contained possible cue words, and the pattern of effects was the same. See the online supplemental material for full details of these analyses.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant awarded to the first author by the University of Chester.