Facial expressions can display personal emotions and indicate an individual’s intentions within a social situation. They are extremely important to the social interaction of individuals. Background scenes in which faces are perceived provide important contextual information for facial expression processing. The purpose of this study was to explore the time course of emotional congruency effects in processing faces and scenes simultaneously by recording event-related potentials (ERPs). The behavioral results found that the categorization of facial expression was faster and more accurate when the face was emotionally congruent than incongruent with the emotion displayed by the scene. In ERPs the late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes were modulated by the emotional congruency between faces and scenes. Specifically, happy faces elicited larger LPP amplitudes within positive than within negative scenes and fearful faces within negative scenes elicited larger LPP amplitudes than within positive scenes. The results did not find the scene effects on the P1 and N170 components. These findings indicate that emotional congruency effects could occur in late stages of facial expression processing, reflecting motivated attention allocation.

No abstract

No abstract

Background visual scenes in which faces are perceived provide contextual information for facial expression processing. One type of background information, the language context, has a vital influence on facial expression processing. The current study is aimed to investigate the effect of the language context on facial expression processing by recording event-related potentials (ERPs). Experiment one adopted the facial expression categorization task to investigate the effects of different language contexts on emotional and non-emotional facial processing. Experiment two adopted the task-irrelevant paradigm to investigate whether the language context effect on facial expression processing was mandatory. The results found that (1) the language context affected facial expression processing. Facial expression processing was promoted when the language context was emotionally congruent with faces. Moreover, the language context had an evoking effect on neutral faces. To be detailed, neutral facial expressions were evoked to be judged as positive in the positive language context while as negative in the negative language context. (2) The language context effect still affected facial expression processing in a task-irrelevant paradigm. When the language context was emotionally incongruent with facial expressions, larger N170 and LPP amplitudes were elicited, indicating the inhibition of incongruent emotions. These findings prove that the language context effect on facial expression processing is mandatory.