title: Angry, disgusted, or afraid? Studies on the malleability of emotion perception.
abstract: Current theories of emotion perception posit that basic facial expressions signal categorically discrete emotions or affective dimensions of valence and arousal. In both cases, the information is thought to be directly "read out" from the face in a way that is largely immune to context. In contrast, the three studies reported here demonstrated that identical facial configurations convey strikingly different emotions and dimensional values depending on the affective context in which they are embedded. This effect is modulated by the similarity between the target facial expression and the facial expression typically associated with the context. Moreover, by monitoring eye movements, we demonstrated that characteristic fixation patterns previously thought to be determined solely by the facial expression are systematically modulated by emotional context already at very early stages of visual processing, even by the first time the face is fixated. Our results indicate that the perception of basic facial expressions is not context invariant and can be categorically altered by context at early perceptual levels.
authors: Department of Psychology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem 91905, Israel. hillel.aviezer@mail.huji.ac.il
authors: Hillel
authors: H
authors: Aviezer
authors: Ran R
authors: RR
authors: Hassin
authors: Jennifer
authors: J
authors: Ryan
authors: Cheryl
authors: C
authors: Grady
authors: Josh
authors: J
authors: Susskind
authors: Adam
authors: A
authors: Anderson
authors: Morris
authors: M
authors: Moscovitch
authors: Shlomo
authors: S
authors: Bentin
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000339:Affect; D000786:Anger; D005149:Facial Expression; D005239:Fear; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012938:Social Perception; D014796:Visual Perception; D055815:Young Adult