How do you know what emotion someone is expressing? A common method used by psychology researchers is to examine facial expressions–often expressions preselected to try to convey a specific emotion. But the real world is messy. Facial expressions are one cue among many, including body position and tone of voice, and these cues don’t always match up. What do we do when interpreting conflicting or ambiguous cues to emotion?
New research by Ensberg-Diamant and colleagues in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General finds that how you interpret cues depends on who you are. Some people tend to rely consistently on facial expressions, while others rely more on contextual cues. You can think of this like a personality trait or a stable style of thinking about the world. Some people are “face-centric” and others are “context-centric.”
Across six studies, the researchers found that this tendency was stable over time. If you relied on faces more one day, you were more likely to rely on them more another day, too.
The different studies tested different aspects of this relationship:
In this study, people were given facial expressions paired with body postures. The face didn’t match the posture–so you might have someone with an angry face holding a diaper (something disgusting) or a disgusted face with someone making a fist (suggesting anger). They were asked to identify what emotion the face was expressing, but they had conflicting information from the pose. What did they do?
Some of the people consistently ignored the pose and just reported on the face–but others tended to change their interpretation of the face based on the body pose. Based on their responses, people were given a context-centric (vs face-centric) score. Then they were tested again 3-7 days later. The scores doing the task two different days correlated very highly, suggesting this was a stable trait that differed among individuals.
In this study, participants’ tendency to use context in judging emotion was compared to using context in judging more abstract shapes (a series of large and small arrows). Turns out, being context-centric for emotion is distinct from being a “holistic thinker” in a more abstract task.
In this study, the context-centric way of judging emotions in a still photograph (with a face and a pose) was compared to a spoken context cue. Participants had to do a new task, where they see a facial expression and hear a voice describe an emotional situation that doesn’t match it (e.g., a disgust face with the statement “look out, he has a knife!”–which communicates a fear-inspiring situation).
It turns out that if you tend to use posture over face in the photograph task, you also tend to use a spoken sentence over face. This is starting to look like a consistent trait related to using faces to decode emotion.
This study looked at the same face-spoken situation task, and checked if giving explicit instructions to focus on the context changed people’s styles. Maybe people could change their styles if given new instructions? It turns out that a face-centric style wasn’t just related to following instructions more closely.
This study introduced a different way of measuring if someone is face or context-centric. Instead of forcing someone to choose which emotion a face expressed, the new task allowed people to write out whatever expression word they wanted. Trained coders then went in and read the open-ended responses to see which emotions were expressed. It turns out this open-ended way of responding captured the same kind of face-versus-context bias in individuals.
In this study, real recordings of people responding to scary or angering situations were used. These were recordings specifically picked for ambiguity: previous raters had found that the face and body didn’t match up. Again, the face-versus-context style of processing was stable.
The researchers also looked at whether personality was related to this type of emotion cue use. People who were more extraverted and conscientious used context more, but this wasn’t a large effect.
Implications
This research could help explain why people sometimes have such different interpretations of social situations. The researchers offer a compelling real-world example: “Two police officers might discern very different impressions from an arrested individual if one pays more attention to her smiling face and the other to her shaking feet.”
These findings raise interesting questions about the increasing prevalence of video calls and online interactions, where contextual cues may be limited. People who rely heavily on context for emotional interpretation might find these interactions more challenging or less satisfying.
The study also has implications for conditions associated with difficulties in emotion perception, such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Rather than considering deficits in facial expression recognition, the researchers suggest we might need to consider how ASD affects the integration of facial and contextual information.
Does being more face-centric or context-centric make someone better at understanding emotions? The researchers found no evidence that either style is superior. Instead, they suggest there may be “ecological niches” that better suit different perceptual styles. Some situations might benefit from a stronger focus on facial expressions, while others might require more attention to contextual cues.
This research challenges the traditional focus on facial expressions as the primary source of emotional information. As the authors note, while thousands of studies have examined isolated facial expressions, humans rarely encounter “floating heads” in real life. Understanding how people integrate facial and contextual information – and how they differ in this integration – may be crucial for understanding real-world emotion perception.