Double-checking emotions: Valence and emotion category in contextual integration of facial expressions of emotion

Abstract

Faces showing happy, angry or fearful expressions were presented in emotionally congruent or incongruent situational contexts (short sentences describing events that would usually provoke happiness, anger or fear). The participants were assigned the task of judging whether the expression was appropriate or not to the context (congruency judgment task). Effects of emotional congruency were observed at both the behavioral and electrophysiological levels. Behavioral results showed evidence of congruency effects based on specific emotion content (e.g., less accurate and slower responses to fear faces in angry contexts). Event-related-potentials (ERP) results also showed emotional congruency effects at different post-stimulus onset latencies, beginning with the face-sensitive N170 component. An effect of emotional congruency was also shown on the N400 component that is typically sensitive to semantic congruency. Finally, a late positive potential (LPP), appearing at 450–650 ms post-stimulus onset showed a complex pattern of effects with modulations driven by the different combinations of contexts and target expressions. These results are interpreted in terms of a double process of valence and emotion checking that is supposed to underlie affective processing and contextual integration of facial expressions of emotions.