Watch the face and look at the body!

Human emotion processes are traditionally investigated in the laboratory by using facial expressions. However, information from other sources, such as the emotion of the voice, the body or the surrounding context, seems to influence the way we perceive the face. In the current experiment compound stimuli consisting of faces and bodies expressing fear or happiness, with the same (congruent) or different (incongruent) emotion, were presented. Participants had to judge either the emotion of the face or the body. Our data clearly show that face and body expressions influence each other. Accuracy was negatively influenced by the incongruent emotion of the bodily expression, but only when the target face expressed a happy emotion. When a fearful or happy body had to be judged, both incongruent face emotions affected the accuracy similarly. The same pattern was observed for the reaction times for judgement of the body emotion, while no influence of the body was observed when the emotion of the face had to be judged. Our results indicate that face and body expressions influence each other but that the way the one biases the perception of the other is dependent on the specific emotion and on which the attention is focused. (Netherlands Journal of Psychology, 64, 143-151.)

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