The Effect Of Contexts On Facial Expression Processing In Primary School Children

Facial expressions plays an extremely important social role.People not only can use it to express their own subjective emotions and social activities’ intention,but also can understand the situation quickly and make adaptive behaviors through others’ facial expressions.Most of the previous studies focused on independent facial expressions.But in our real life,we hardly see facial expressions appear alone,they always appear with lots of background information,that is,the context.Currently,the research of background information on facial expression processing mostly in the pure cognitive processing point of view,they often use the traditional category judgment tasks to collect the time and accuracy of reaction as the process indicators.But in fact,we will not only do behavioral responses to some certain situations,it usually also with some emotional experience.For a comprehensive study of the context effects in facial expression processing,we study from cognitive processing and emotional attitude to analyze the influence of background information on pupils in facial expression recognition.Experiment 1 investigates the context effects of a single background information with faces and natural scenes pictures as experimental material.It was found that both of face and natural scenes pictures can arouse the context effects in face recognition process,and there was no significant difference between them.Experiment 2 is a supplementary experiment of Experiment 1,with the meaningless scene image as experimental material to investigate the context effects of meaningless scene pictures.It was found that the physical characteristics of the scene image,such as color,brightness,and other non-emotional information can not cause the context effects.Experiment 3 uses the composite image of the natural scene and face as the experimental material,and investigates the context effect under the composite background information.It was found that the scene in the composite picture has a positive effect on the emotional initiation of the face which in the composite picture has the same emotional valence,and the inconsistency is hindered.Experiment 4 takes sentences and face images as experimental materials,and manipulates sentences to create contexts that are close to life,and examines the context effects of face preference tasks.The results showed that pupils’ face preference was adjusted by background information.All those results support the dimension view,which shows that the background information contained in the context has a moderating effect on the facial expressions of pupils.