Target's Social Status Modulates Contextual Effect In Emotion Perception

In our daily life,we often need to process other people's facial expressions in order to infer their emotional state,and this kind of processing is hardly can be performed without context: Individuals' processing of facial expressions usually occurs in the scene.Social status,as an important personal information in every culture,also affects the processing of facial expressions.However,previous studies have rarely explored how the social status of target affects the processing of facial expression in the context.This study manipulates social status of faces and discusses how the targets' social position information and scenes affect the processing of facial expression in two situations:(1)when the scene shows up before the face;(2)and when the scene appears at the same time with the face.At the same time,event-related potentials(ERPs)are used in this study in order to record the EEG activity of how scene and face information affects facial expression processing.In study 1,it was found that the targets' social status does not affect the behavioral data of the facial expression processing when the scene is presented first,but it was found a contextual effect during the processing.Specifically,when the facial expression is the same emotion as the scene,the expression processing is promoted.When inconsistent,the proc essing is hindered;however,in study 2,when faces and scenes are presented at the same time,targets' social status affects the individual's processing of the facial expressions.Specifically,compared with the low social status faces,participants have higher recognition accuracy of high social status facial expressions.There was no contextual effect was found in this study.EEG data shows that compared with low social status faces,high social status faces trigger a larger P1 and N170 components,but the difference in P1 components is only significant in the right brain area.Emotional scenes induce larger P1 components than pixel(no emotional meaning)scenes.In addition,it was found an interaction between face and social status in the N2 component.When individual process angry faces of low social status targets,it induces a larger N2 than sad faces.In summary,when individuals process facial expressions of different social status targets,the processing of high social status targets' facial expression is more accurately,and it is not affected by the scene.Faces' social status information and scenes are processed at the earliest stage of the individual's facial expression processing.This influence continues throughout the whole face processing.For the first time,this study directly examines how individuals processing facial expressions of different social status groups in the scene by using the high time resolution characteristics of ERPs,and reveals the indivi dual's physiological mechanism of facial expressions' processing of different social status targets in the scene,and provides physiological results support and research idea s for further research.At the same time,the results of this study have great significance on helping people understand how individuals process different social status targets' facial expression in their real lives.