Steward Ben A, Mewton Paige, Palermo Romina, Dawel Amy
School of Medicine and Psychology, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, 2601, Australia.
School of Psychological Science, The University of Western Australia, Perth, WA, 6009, Australia.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2025 Apr 3. doi: 10.3758/s13423-025-02678-6.
Long-standing theories in emotion perception, such as basic emotion theory, argue that we primarily perceive others' emotions through facial expressions. However, compelling evidence shows that other visual contexts, such as body posture or scenes, significantly influence the emotions perceived from faces and vice versa. We used meta-analysis to synthesise and quantify these effects for the first time, testing if faces have primacy over context after accounting for key moderators. Namely, the emotional congruency and clarity of the stimuli. A total of 1,020 effect sizes from 37 articles and 3,198 participants were meta-analysed using three-level mixed-effects models with robust variance estimation. Both visual context and faces were found to have large effects on emotion labelling for the other (g > 1.23). Effects were larger when visual context and faces signalled different (incongruent) rather than the same (congruent) emotions and congruent effects were moderated by how clearly stimuli signalled the target emotion. When these factors were accounted for, faces were no more influential in altering emotion labelling than body postures or body postures with scenes. The findings of this review clearly evidence the integrative nature of emotion perception. Importantly, however, they also highlight that the influence of different emotion signals depends on how clearly they signal an emotion. Future research needs to account for emotional congruency and signal clarity.
长期以来的情绪感知理论，如基本情绪理论，认为我们主要通过面部表情来感知他人的情绪。然而，有力的证据表明，其他视觉背景，如身体姿势或场景，会显著影响从面部感知到的情绪，反之亦然。我们首次使用元分析来综合和量化这些影响，在考虑关键调节因素后测试面部是否比背景具有首要地位。即刺激的情绪一致性和清晰度。使用具有稳健方差估计的三级混合效应模型对来自37篇文章的1020个效应量和3198名参与者进行了元分析。结果发现，视觉背景和面部对彼此的情绪标签都有很大影响（g>1.23）。当视觉背景和面部传达不同（不一致）而非相同（一致）的情绪时，影响更大，并且一致效应受刺激传达目标情绪的清晰程度的调节。当考虑这些因素时，面部在改变情绪标签方面并不比身体姿势或带有场景的身体姿势更具影响力。本综述的结果清楚地证明了情绪感知的整合性质。然而，重要的是，它们还强调不同情绪信号的影响取决于它们传达情绪的清晰程度。未来的研究需要考虑情绪一致性和信号清晰度。
