The Judgment of Emotion from Facial Expressions, Contexts, and Their Combination

Abstract

Summary On the basis of a critique of the ecological validity of previous research, 15 male and 15 female undergraduates were shown 10 newsmagazine photographs and their captions under three informational conditions: target face alone, context alone (i.e., picture and caption with target face masked), and target face plus context combination. The S was told that the task was always to judge what the target person was feeling from the information presented. Ratings on a pleasure-displeasure emotion intensity scale and interview protocols were gathered on each judgment. Findings indicated that judgments cannot be accounted for by a unitary principle based on the combination of isolated, physical stimuli. With the use of stimuli and a methodological procedure pertaining more to the way people actually judge emotion in everyday life, it was found that facial and contextual sources are related in terms of the way people see them meaningfully embedded in larger, human life context.