Recent evidence shows that body context may alter the categorization of facial expressions. However, less is known about how facial expressions influence the categorization of emotional bodies. We hypothesized that context effects would be displayed bidirectionally, from bodies to faces and from faces to bodies. Participants viewed emotional face-body compounds and were required to categorize emotions of faces (Condition 1), bodies (Condition 2), or full persons (Condition 3). Results showed evidence for bidirectional context effects: faces were influenced by bodies, and bodies were influenced by faces. However, because the specific confusability patterns differ for faces and bodies (e.g., disgust and anger expressions are confusable in the face, but less so in the body) we found unique patterns of contextual influence in each expression channel. Together, the findings suggest that the emotional expressions of faces and bodies contextualize each other bidirectionally and that emotion categorization is sensitive to the perceptual focus determined by task instructions.

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Semantic emotional labels can influence the recognition of isolated facial expressions. However, it is unknown if labels also influence the susceptibility of facial expressions to context. To examine this, participants categorized expressive faces presented with emotionally congruent or incongruent bodies, serving as context. Face-body composites were presented together, aligned in their natural form, or spatially misaligned with the head shifted horizontally beside the body-a condition known to reduce the contextual impact of the body on the face. Critically, participants responded either by choosing emotion labels or by perceptually matching the target expression with expression probes. The results show a label dominance effect: Face-body congruency effects were larger with semantic labels than with perceptual expression matching, indicating that facial expressions are more prone to contextual influence when categorized with emotion labels, an effect only found when faces and bodies were aligned. These findings suggest that the role of conceptual language in face-body context effects may be larger than previously assumed.