Prior information about another’s emotional state shapes the perceptual representation of their facial expressions

Abstract

Abstract

A large body of evidence demonstrates that contextual information can shape emotional face expression evaluation. However, recent predictive processing accounts propose that prior information about how a person is feeling should impact not only how facial expressions are rated but also how they are perceptually represented. We tested this by presenting participants with an auditory statement indicating how a person is feeling (“I feel so happy/sad!”), followed by a dynamic facial morph that changed towards the expected or unexpected emotion. Participants then judged the final facial expression of the morph. We found that facial expressions were rated in line with the statement emotion, such that happy facial expressions were rated as happier following a happy cue compared to a sad cue (Experiment 1a) and congruent face and statement pairings were rated as more intense (Experiment 1b). When participants made a perceptual comparison between the final expression and a probe face (i.e., final morph expression that was more/less expressive), we robustly found that facial expressions were perceived as more expressive than they actually were (Experiments 2a, 2b), in line with previous literature. Crucially, we found that the extent of this overestimation depended on the congruence between the emotion of face and statement, leading to greater overestimation of congruent pairings, when sufficient time was provided to process the face emotion (Experiment 2b). Our findings, for the first time, show that prior information can affect not only explicit emotional inference but also shape perceptual representation of facial expressions, in line with predictive processing accounts.