TY  - JOUR
A1  - Schwarz, Katharina A.
A1  - Wieser, Matthias J.
A1  - Gerdes, Antje B. M.
A1  - Mühlberger, Andreas
A1  - Pauli, Paul
T1  - Why are you looking like that? How the context influences evaluation and processing of human faces
JF  - Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
N2  - Perception and evaluation of facial expressions are known to be heavily modulated by emotional features of contextual information. Such contextual effects, however, might also be driven by non-emotional aspects of contextual information, an interaction of emotional and non-emotional factors, and by the observers’ inherent traits. Therefore, we sought to assess whether contextual information about self-reference in addition to information about valence influences the evaluation and neural processing of neutral faces. Furthermore, we investigated whether social anxiety moderates these effects. In the present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, participants viewed neutral facial expressions preceded by a contextual sentence conveying either positive or negative evaluations about the participant or about somebody else. Contextual influences were reflected in rating and fMRI measures, with strong effects of self-reference on brain activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and right fusiform gyrus. Additionally, social anxiety strongly affected the response to faces conveying negative, self-related evaluations as revealed by the participants’ rating patterns and brain activity in cortical midline structures and regions of interest in the left and right middle frontal gyrus. These results suggest that face perception and processing are highly individual processes influenced by emotional and non-emotional aspects of contextual information and further modulated by individual personality traits.
KW  - social anxiety
KW  - facial expression
KW  - context
KW  - self-reference
Y1  - 2013
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-132126
VL  - 8
IS  - 4
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Wieser, Mattias J.
A1  - Brosch, Tobias
T1  - Faces in context: A review and systematization of contextual influences on affective face processing
N2  - Facial expressions are of eminent importance for social interaction as they convey information about other individuals’ emotions and social intentions. According to the predominant “basic emotion” approach, the perception of emotion in faces is based on the rapid, auto- matic categorization of prototypical, universal expressions. Consequently, the perception of facial expressions has typically been investigated using isolated, de-contextualized, static pictures of facial expressions that maximize the distinction between categories. However, in everyday life, an individual’s face is not perceived in isolation, but almost always appears within a situational context, which may arise from other people, the physical environment surrounding the face, as well as multichannel information from the sender. Furthermore, situational context may be provided by the perceiver, including already present social infor- mation gained from affective learning and implicit processing biases such as race bias.Thus, the perception of facial expressions is presumably always influenced by contextual vari- ables. In this comprehensive review, we aim at (1) systematizing the contextual variables that may influence the perception of facial expressions and (2) summarizing experimental paradigms and findings that have been used to investigate these influences. The studies reviewed here demonstrate that perception and neural processing of facial expressions are substantially modified by contextual information, including verbal, visual, and auditory information presented together with the face as well as knowledge or processing biases already present in the observer. These findings further challenge the assumption of auto- matic, hardwired categorical emotion extraction mechanisms predicted by basic emotion theories. Taking into account a recent model on face processing, we discuss where and when these different contextual influences may take place, thus outlining potential avenues in future research.
KW  - Psychologie
KW  - facial expression
KW  - face perception
KW  - emotion
KW  - context
KW  - “basic emotion”
Y1  - 2012
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-76351
ER  -