The Kuleshov Effect: the influence of contextual framing on emotional attributions

Face and context integration in emotion inference is limited and variable across categories and individuals

The ability to make nuanced inferences about other people's emotional states is central to social functioning. While emotion inferences can be sensitive to both facial movements and the situational context that they occur in, relatively little is understood about when these two sources of information are integrated across emotion categories and individuals. In a series of studies, we use one archival and five empirical datasets to demonstrate that people could be integrating, but that emotion inferences are just as well (and sometimes better) captured by knowledge of the situation alone, while isolated facial cues are insufficient. Further, people integrate facial cues more for categories for which they most frequently encounter facial expressions in everyday life (e.g., happiness). People are also moderately stable over time in their reliance on situational cues and integration of cues and those who reliably utilize situation cues more also have better situated emotion knowledge. These findings underscore the importance of studying variability in reliance on and integration of cues.

Influence of transient emotional episodes on affective and cognitive theory of mind

Our emotions may influence how we interact with others. Previous studies have shown an important role of emotion induction in generating empathic reactions towards others' affect. However, it remains unclear whether (and to which extent) our own emotions can influence the ability to infer people's mental states, a process associated with Theory of Mind (ToM) and implicated in the representation of both cognitive (e.g. beliefs and intentions) and affective conditions. We engaged 59 participants in two emotion-induction experiments where they saw joyful, neutral and fearful clips. Subsequently, they were asked to infer other individuals' joy, fear (affective ToM) or beliefs (cognitive ToM) from verbal scenarios. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we found that brain activity in the superior temporal gyrus, precuneus and sensorimotor cortices were modulated by the preceding emotional induction, with lower response when the to-be-inferred emotion was incongruent with the one induced in the observer (affective ToM). Instead, we found no effect of emotion induction on the appraisal of people's beliefs (cognitive ToM). These findings are consistent with embodied accounts of affective ToM, whereby our own emotions alter the engagement of key brain regions for social cognition, depending on the compatibility between one's own and others' affect.

Perceptual oddities: assessing the relationship between film editing and prediction processes

During film viewing, humans parse sequences of individual shots into larger narrative structures, often weaving transitions at edit points into an apparently seamless and continuous flow. Editing helps filmmakers manipulate visual transitions to induce feelings of fluency/disfluency, tension/relief, curiosity, expectation and several emotional responses. We propose that the perceptual dynamics induced by film editing can be captured by a predictive processing (PP) framework. We hypothesise that visual discontinuities at edit points produce discrepancies between anticipated and actual sensory input, leading to prediction error. Further, we propose that the magnitude of prediction error depends on the predictability of each shot within the narrative flow, and lay out an account based on conflict monitoring. We test this hypothesis in two empirical studies measuring electroencephalography (EEG) during passive viewing of film excerpts, as well as behavioural responses during an active edit detection task. We report the neural and behavioural modulations at editing boundaries across three levels of narrative depth, showing greater modulations for edits spanning less predictable, deeper narrative transitions. Overall, our contribution lays the groundwork for understanding film editing from a PP perspective. This article is part of the theme issue 'Art, aesthetics and predictive processing: theoretical and empirical perspectivess'.

Neural computations underlying contextual processing in humans

Context shapes our perception of facial expressions during everyday social interactions. We interpret a person’s face in a hostile situation negatively and judge the same face under pleasant circumstances positively. Critical to our adaptive fitness, context provides situation-specific framing to resolve ambiguity and guide our interpersonal behavior. This context-specific modulation of facial expression is thought to engage the amygdala, hippocampus, and orbitofrontal cortex; however, the underlying neural computations remain unknown. Here we use human intracranial electroencephalograms (EEGs) directly recorded from these regions and report bidirectional theta-gamma interactions within the amygdala-hippocampal network, facilitating contextual processing. Contextual information is subsequently represented in the orbitofrontal cortex, where a theta phase shift binds context and face associations within theta cycles, endowing faces with contextual meanings at behavioral timescales. Our results identify theta phase shifts as mediating associations between context and face processing, supporting flexible social behavior.

Context influences our perception of facial expressions. Zheng et al. show that contextual modulation of faces relies on medial temporal lobe-orbitofrontal cortex communications in humans. High gamma bursts occur in rhythm with theta oscillations, with cross-regional theta-gamma phase shifts binding context-face associations.

Neural signatures of individual variability in context-dependent perception of ambiguous facial expression

How do we incorporate contextual information to infer others' emotional state? Here we employed a naturalistic context-dependent facial expression estimation task where participants estimated pleasantness levels of others' ambiguous expression faces when sniffing different contextual cues (e.g., urine, fish, water, and rose). Based on their pleasantness rating data, we placed participants on a context-dependency continuum and mapped the individual variability in the context-dependency onto the neural representation using a representational similarity analysis. We found that the individual variability in the context-dependency of facial expression estimation correlated with the activity level of the pregenual anterior cingulate cortex (pgACC) and the amygdala and was also decoded by the neural representation of the ventral anterior insula (vAI). A dynamic causal modeling revealed that those with higher context-dependency exhibited a greater degree of the modulation from vAI to the pgACC. These findings provide novel insights into the neural circuitry associated with the individual variability in context-dependent facial expression estimation and the first empirical evidence for individual variability in the predictive accounts of affective states.

People's dispositional cooperative tendencies towards robots are unaffected by robots' negative emotional displays in prisoner's dilemma games

The study explores the impact of robots' emotional displays on people's tendency to cooperate with a robot opponent in prisoner's dilemma games. Participants played iterated prisoner's dilemma games with a non-expressive robot (as a measure of cooperative baseline), followed by an angry, and a sad robot, in turn. Based on the Emotion as Social Information model, we expected participants with higher cooperative predispositions to cooperate less when a robot displayed anger, and cooperate more when the robot displayed sadness. Contrarily, according to this model, participants with lower cooperative predispositions should cooperate more with an angry robot and less with a sad robot. The results of 60 participants failed to support the predictions. Only the participants' cooperative predispositions significantly predicted their cooperative tendencies during gameplay. Participants who cooperated more in the baseline measure also cooperated more with the robots displaying sadness and anger. In exploratory analyses, we found that participants who accurately recognised the robots' sad and angry displays tended to cooperate less with them overall. The study highlights the impact of personal factors in human-robot cooperation, and how these factors might surpass the influence of bottom-up emotional displays by the robots in the present experimental scenario.

Naltrexone modulates contextual processing in depression

Context, the information surrounding an experience, can significantly alter the meaning and the affective responses to events. Yet the biological mechanisms through which context modulate experiences are not entirely understood. Here, we hypothesized that the µ-opioid system-extensively implicated in placebo effects, a clinical phenomenon thought to rely on contextual processing-modulates the effects of contextual information on emotional attributions in patients with depression. To test this hypothesis, 20 unmedicated patients with depression completed a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover study of one dose of 50 mg of naltrexone, or placebo immediately before completing two sessions of the Contextual Framing fMRI task. This task captures effects of valenced contextual cues (pleasant vs. unpleasant) on emotional attribution (the rating of subtle emotional faces: fearful, neutral, or happy). Behaviorally, we found that emotional attribution was significantly moderated by the interaction between contextual cues and subtle emotional faces, such that participants' ratings of valenced faces (fearful and happy), compared to neutral, were more negative during unpleasant, compared to pleasant context cues. At a neural level, context-induced blood-oxygen-level-dependent responses in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the dorsal anterior cingulate, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and the lateral orbitofrontal cortex, significantly moderated the effects of context on emotional attribution, and were blunted by naltrexone. Furthermore, the effects of naltrexone on emotional attribution were partially abolished in more severely depressed patients. Our results provide insights into the molecular alterations underlying context representation in patients with depression, providing pivotal early data for future treatment studies.

An examination of the Kuleshov effect using still photographs

The goal of the present study was to examine whether the effect of visual context on the interpretation of facial expression from an actor’s face could be produced using isolated photographic stills, instead of the typical dynamic film sequences used to demonstrate the effect. Two-photograph sequences consisting of a context photograph varying in pleasantness and a photograph of an actor’s neutral face were presented. Participants performed a liking rating task for the context photograph (to ensure attention to the stimulus) and they performed three tasks for the face stimulus: labeling the emotion portrayed by the actor, rating valence, and rating arousal. The results of the labeling data confirmed the existence of a visual context effect, with more faces labeled as “happy” after viewing pleasant context and more faces labeled “sad” or “fearful” after viewing unpleasant context. This effect was demonstrated when no explicit connection between the context stimulus and face stimulus was invoked, with the contextual information exerting its effect on labeling after being held in memory for at least 10 seconds. The results for ratings of valence and arousal were mixed. Overall, the results suggest that isolated photograph sequences produce a Kuleshov-type context effect on attributions of emotion to actors’ faces, replicating previous research conducted with dynamic film sequences.

Context facilitates performance on a classic cross-cultural emotion perception task

The majority of studies designed to assess cross-cultural emotion perception use a choice-from-array task in which participants are presented with brief emotion stories and asked to choose between target and foil cues. This task has been widely criticized, evoking a lively and prolonged debate about whether it inadvertently helps participants to perform better than they otherwise would, resulting in the appearance of universality. In 3 studies, we provide a strong test of the hypothesis that the classic choice-from-array task constitutes a potent source of context that shapes performance. Participants from a remote small-scale (the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania) and 2 urban industrialized (China and the United States) cultural samples selected target vocalizations that were contrived for 6 non-English, nonuniversal emotion categories at levels significantly above chance. In studies of anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise, above chance performance is interpreted as evidence of universality. These studies support the hypothesis that choice-from-array tasks encourage evidence for cross-cultural emotion perception. We discuss these findings with reference to the history of cross-cultural emotion perception studies, and suggest several processes that may, together, give rise to the appearance of universal emotions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Emotional Expressions Reconsidered: Challenges to Inferring Emotion From Human Facial Movements

It is commonly assumed that a person's emotional state can be readily inferred from his or her facial movements, typically called emotional expressions or facial expressions. This assumption influences legal judgments, policy decisions, national security protocols, and educational practices; guides the diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric illness, as well as the development of commercial applications; and pervades everyday social interactions as well as research in other scientific fields such as artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and computer vision. In this article, we survey examples of this widespread assumption, which we refer to as the common view, and we then examine the scientific evidence that tests this view, focusing on the six most popular emotion categories used by consumers of emotion research: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. The available scientific evidence suggests that people do sometimes smile when happy, frown when sad, scowl when angry, and so on, as proposed by the common view, more than what would be expected by chance. Yet how people communicate anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise varies substantially across cultures, situations, and even across people within a single situation. Furthermore, similar configurations of facial movements variably express instances of more than one emotion category. In fact, a given configuration of facial movements, such as a scowl, often communicates something other than an emotional state. Scientists agree that facial movements convey a range of information and are important for social communication, emotional or otherwise. But our review suggests an urgent need for research that examines how people actually move their faces to express emotions and other social information in the variety of contexts that make up everyday life, as well as careful study of the mechanisms by which people perceive instances of emotion in one another. We make specific research recommendations that will yield a more valid picture of how people move their faces to express emotions and how they infer emotional meaning from facial movements in situations of everyday life. This research is crucial to provide consumers of emotion research with the translational information they require.

How the Brain Converts Negative Evaluation into Performance Facilitation

Surpassing negative evaluation is a recurrent theme of success stories. Yet, there is little evidence supporting the counterintuitive idea that negative evaluation might not only motivate people, but also enhance performance. To address this question, we designed a task that required participants to decide whether taking up a risky challenge after receiving positive or negative evaluations from independent judges. Participants believed that these evaluations were based on their prior performance on a related task. Results showed that negative evaluation caused a facilitation in performance. Concurrent functional magnetic resonance imaging revealed that the motivating effect of negative evaluation was represented in the insula and striatum, while the performance boost was associated with functional positive connectivity between the insula and a set of brain regions involved in goal-directed behavior and the orienting of attention. These findings provide new insight into the neural representation of negative evaluation-induced facilitation.

Ecological micro-expression recognition characteristics of young adults with subthreshold depression

The micro-expression (ME) processing characteristics of patients with depression has been studied but has not been investigated in people with subthreshold depression. Based on this, by adopting the ecological MEs recognition paradigm, this study aimed to explore ME recognition in people with subthreshold depression. A 4 (background expression: happy, neutral, sad and fearful) × 4 (ME: happy, neutral, sad, and fearful) study was designed; two groups of participants (experimental group with subthreshold depression vs. healthy control group, 32 participants in each group) were asked to complete the ecological ME recognition task, and the corresponding accuracy (ACC) and reaction time (RT) were analyzed. Results: (1) Under different background conditions, recognizing happy MEs had the highest ACC and shortest RT. (2) There was no significant difference in the ACC and RT between experimental and control groups. (3)In different contexts, individuals with subthreshold depression tended to misjudge neutral, sad, and fearful MEs as happy, while neutral MEs were misjudged as sad and fearful. (4) The performance of individuals with subthreshold depression in the ecological ME recognition task were influenced by the type of ME; they showed highest ACC and shortest RT when recognizing happy MEs (vs. the other MEs). Conclusions: (1) The performance of individuals’ ecological ME recognition were influenced by the background expression, and this embodied the need for ecological ME recognition. (2) Individuals with subthreshold depression showed normal ecological ME recognition ability. (3) In terms of misjudgment, individuals with subthreshold depression showed both positive and negative bias, when completing the ecological ME recognition task. (4) Compared with the other MEs, happy MEs showed an advantage recognition effect for individuals with subthreshold depression who completed the ecological ME recognition task.

Increased activation in the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and temporal pole during tonality change in music

In human music, the tonality (key) may change to punctuate sectional structures and to produce emotional effects. A tonality change would sound "smoother" when it is supported by appropriate harmony. This functional magnetic resonance imaging study examined the neural substrates of the processing of tonality change. We used a 2 × 2 factorial design with factors tonality change (tonality changed versus tonality unchanged) and harmonization (harmonized versus unharmonized). Participants were asked to covertly sing the pitch names in the movable-do system along with the heard melody. Repetitions of this melody were associated with or without a tonality change, with equal probability in a pseudo-random order. Our result demonstrated that tonality changes elicited increased activation in the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and left temporal pole. When a tonality change occurred, the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex might underpin the cognitive control for retrieving the pitch-naming rule of the new tonality, whereas the left temporal pole might integrate the melodic/harmonic context and emotional meanings of music. This study provides a new insight into the cognitive and emotional processing of music.

How context influences the interpretation of facial expressions: a source localization high-density EEG study on the "Kuleshov effect"

Few studies have explored the specificities of contextual modulations of the processing of facial expressions at a neuronal level. This study fills this gap by employing an original paradigm, based on a version of the filmic “Kuleshov effect”. High-density EEG was recorded while participants watched film sequences consisting of three shots: the close-up of a target person’s neutral face (Face_1), the scene that the target person was looking at (happy, fearful, or neutral), and another close-up of the same target person’s neutral face (Face_2). The participants’ task was to rate both valence and arousal, and subsequently to categorize the target person’s emotional state. The results indicate that despite a significant behavioural ‘context’ effect, the electrophysiological indexes still indicate that the face is evaluated as neutral. Specifically, Face_2 elicited a high amplitude N170 when preceded by neutral contexts, and a high amplitude Late Positive Potential (LPP) when preceded by emotional contexts, thus showing sensitivity to the evaluative congruence (N170) and incongruence (LPP) between context and Face_2. The LPP activity was mainly underpinned by brain regions involved in facial expressions and emotion recognition processing. Our results shed new light on temporal and neural correlates of context-sensitivity in the interpretation of facial expressions.

Does picture background matter? People's evaluation of pigs in different farm settings

Pictures of farm animals and their husbandry systems are frequently presented in the media and are mostly connected to discussions surrounding farm animal welfare. How such pictures are perceived by the broader public is not fully understood thus far. It is presumable that the animals' expressions and body languages as well as their depicted environment or husbandry systems affect public perception. Therefore, the aim of this study is to test how the evaluation of a picture showing a farmed pig is influenced by portrayed attributes, as well as participants' perceptions of pigs' abilities in general, and if connection to agriculture has an influence. In an online survey, 1,019 German residents were shown four modified pictures of a pig in a pen. The pictures varied with regards to facial expression and body language of the pig ('happy' versus 'unhappy' pig) and the barn setting (straw versus slatted floor pen). Respondents were asked to evaluate both the pen and the welfare of the pig. Two Linear Mixed Models were calculated to analyze effects on pig and pen evaluation. For the pictures, the pen had the largest influence on both pig and pen evaluation, followed by the pig's appearance and participants' beliefs in pigs' mental and emotional abilities, as well as their connection to agriculture. The welfare of both the 'happy' and the 'unhappy' pig was assessed to be higher in the straw setting compared to the slatted floor setting in our study, and even the 'unhappy pig' on straw was perceived more positively than the 'happy pig' on slatted floor. The straw pen was evaluated as being better than the slatted floor pen on the pictures we presented but the pens also differed in level of dirt on the walls (more dirt in the slatted floor pen), which might have influenced the results. Nevertheless, the results suggest that enduring aspects of pictures such as the husbandry system influence perceptions more than a momentary body expression of the pig, at least in the settings tested herein.

Influential Cognitive Processes on Framing Biases in Aging

Factors that contribute to overcoming decision-making biases in later life pose an important investigational question given the increasing older adult population. Limited empirical evidence exists and the literature remains equivocal of whether increasing age is associated with elevated susceptibility to decision-making biases such as framing effects. Research into the individual differences contributing to decision-making ability may offer better understanding of the influence of age in decision-making ability. Changes in cognition underlying decision-making have been shown with increased age and may contribute to individual variability in decision-making abilities. This study had three aims; (1) to understand the influence of age on susceptibility to decision-making biases as measured by framing effects across a large, continuous age range; (2) to examine influence of cognitive abilities that change with age; and (3) to understand the influence of individual factors such as gender and education on susceptibility to framing effects. 200 individuals (28-79 years of age) were tested on a large battery of cognitive measures in the domains of executive function, memory and complex attention. Findings from this study demonstrated that cognitive abilities such as strategic control and delayed memory better predicted susceptibility to framing biases than age. The current findings demonstrate that age may not be as influential a factor in decision-making as cognitive ability and cognitive reserve. These findings motivate future studies to better characterize cognitive ability to determine decision-making susceptibilities in aging populations.

Children Facial Expression Production: Influence of Age, Gender, Emotion Subtype, Elicitation Condition and Culture

The production of facial expressions (FEs) is an important skill that allows children to share and adapt emotions with their relatives and peers during social interactions. These skills are impaired in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. However, the way in which typical children develop and master their production of FEs has still not been clearly assessed. This study aimed to explore factors that could influence the production of FEs in childhood such as age, gender, emotion subtype (sadness, anger, joy, and neutral), elicitation task (on request, imitation), area of recruitment (French Riviera and Parisian) and emotion multimodality. A total of one hundred fifty-seven children aged 6–11 years were enrolled in Nice and Paris, France. We asked them to produce FEs in two different tasks: imitation with an avatar model and production on request without a model. Results from a multivariate analysis revealed that: (1) children performed better with age. (2) Positive emotions were easier to produce than negative emotions. (3) Children produced better FE on request (as opposed to imitation); and (4) Riviera children performed better than Parisian children suggesting regional influences on emotion production. We conclude that facial emotion production is a complex developmental process influenced by several factors that needs to be acknowledged in future research.

The Temporal Pole Top-Down Modulates the Ventral Visual Stream During Social Cognition

The temporal pole (TP) has been associated with diverse functions of social cognition and emotion processing. Although the underlying mechanism remains elusive, one possibility is that TP acts as domain-general hub integrating socioemotional information. To test this, 26 participants were presented with 60 empathy-evoking film clips during fMRI scanning. The film clips were preceded by a linguistic sad or neutral context and half of the clips were accompanied by sad music. In line with its hypothesized role, TP was involved in the processing of sad context and furthermore tracked participants' empathic concern. To examine the neuromodulatory impact of TP, we applied nonlinear dynamic causal modeling to a multisensory integration network from previous work consisting of superior temporal gyrus (STG), fusiform gyrus (FG), and amygdala, which was extended by an additional node in the TP. Bayesian model comparison revealed a gating of STG and TP on fusiform-amygdalar coupling and an increase of TP to FG connectivity during the integration of contextual information. Moreover, these backward projections were strengthened by emotional music. The findings indicate that during social cognition, TP integrates information from different modalities and top-down modulates lower-level perceptual areas in the ventral visual stream as a function of integration demands.

Cryptic Emotions and the Emergence of a Metatheory of Mind in Popular Filmmaking

Hollywood movies can be deeply engaging and easy to understand. To succeed in this manner, feature‐length movies employ many editing techniques with strong psychological underpinnings. We explore the origins and development of one of these, the reaction shot. This shot typically shows a single, unspeaking character with modest facial expression in response to an event or to the behavior or speech of another character. In a sample of movies from 1940 to 2010, we show that the prevalence of one type of these shots—which we call the cryptic reaction shot—has grown dramatically. These shots are designed to enhance viewers’ emotional involvement with characters. They depict a facial gesture that reflects a slightly negative and slightly aroused emotional state. Their use at the end of conversations, and typically at the end of scenes, helps to leave viewers in a state of speculation about what the character is thinking and what her thoughts may mean for the ongoing narrative.

How Context Influences Our Perception of Emotional Faces: A Behavioral Study on the Kuleshov Effect

Facial expressions are of major importance in understanding the mental and emotional states of others. So far, most studies on the perception and comprehension of emotions have used isolated facial expressions as stimuli; for example, photographs of actors displaying facial expressions corresponding to one of the so called ‘basic emotions.’ However, our real experience during social interactions is different: facial expressions of emotion are mostly perceived in a wider context, constituted by body language, the surrounding environment, and our beliefs and expectations. Already in the early twentieth century, the Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov argued that such context, established by intermediate shots of strong emotional content, could significantly change our interpretation of facial expressions in film. Prior experiments have shown behavioral effects pointing in this direction, but have only used static images as stimuli. Our study used a more ecological design with participants watching film sequences of neutral faces, crosscut with scenes of strong emotional content (evoking happiness or fear, plus neutral stimuli as a baseline condition). The task was to rate the emotion displayed by a target person’s face in terms of valence, arousal, and category. Results clearly demonstrated the presence of a significant effect in terms of both valence and arousal in the fear condition only. Moreover, participants tended to categorize the target person’s neutral facial expression choosing the emotion category congruent with the preceding context. Our results highlight the context-sensitivity of emotions and the importance of studying them under ecologically valid conditions.

Self-construal differences in neural responses to negative social cues

Cultures differ substantially in representations of the self. Whereas individualistic cultural groups emphasize an independent self, reflected in processing biases towards centralized salient objects, collectivistic cultures are oriented towards an interdependent self, attending to contextual associations between visual cues. It is unknown how these perceptual biases may affect brain activity in response to negative social cues. Moreover, while some studies have shown that individual differences in self-construal moderate cultural group comparisons, few have examined self-construal differences separate to culture. To investigate these issues, a final sample of a group of healthy participants high in trait levels of collectivistic self-construal (n=16) and individualistic self-construal (n=19), regardless of cultural background, completed a negative social cue evaluation task designed to engage face/object vs context-specific neural processes whilst undergoing fMRI scanning. Between-group analyses revealed that the collectivistic group exclusively engaged the parahippocampal gyrus (parahippocampal place area) - a region critical to contextual integration - during negative face processing - suggesting compensatory activations when contextual information was missing. The collectivist group also displayed enhanced negative context dependent brain activity involving the left superior occipital gyrus/cuneus and right anterior insula. By contrast, the individualistic group did not engage object or localized face processing regions as predicted, but rather demonstrated heightened appraisal and self-referential activations in medial prefrontal and temporoparietal regions to negative contexts - again suggesting compensatory processes when focal cues were absent. While individualists also appeared more sensitive to negative faces in the scenes, activating the right middle cingulate gyrus, dorsal prefrontal and parietal activations, this activity was observed relative to the scrambled baseline, and given that prefrontal and occipital regions were also engaged to neutral stimuli, may suggest an individualistic pattern to processing all social cues more generally. These findings suggest that individual differences in self-construal may be an important organizing framework facilitating perceptual processes to emotionally salient social cues, beyond the boundary of cultural group comparisons.

Neural mechanisms underlying valence inferences to sound: The role of the right angular gyrus

We frequently infer others' intentions based on non-verbal auditory cues. Although the brain underpinnings of social cognition have been extensively studied, no empirical work has yet examined the impact of musical structure manipulation on the neural processing of emotional valence during mental state inferences. We used a novel sound-based theory-of-mind paradigm in which participants categorized stimuli of different sensory dissonance level in terms of positive/negative valence. Whilst consistent with previous studies which propose facilitated encoding of consonances, our results demonstrated that distinct levels of consonance/dissonance elicited differential influences on the right angular gyrus, an area implicated in mental state attribution and attention reorienting processes. Functional and effective connectivity analyses further showed that consonances modulated a specific inhibitory interaction from associative memory to mental state attribution substrates. Following evidence suggesting that individuals with autism may process social affective cues differently, we assessed the relationship between participants' task performance and self-reported autistic traits in clinically typical adults. Higher scores on the social cognition scales of the AQ were associated with deficits in recognising positive valence in consonant sound cues. These findings are discussed with respect to Bayesian perspectives on autistic perception, which highlight a functional failure to optimize precision in relation to prior beliefs.

Transient emotional events and individual affective traits affect emotion recognition in a perceptual decision-making task

Both affective states and personality traits shape how we perceive the social world and interpret emotions. The literature on affective priming has mostly focused on brief influences of emotional stimuli and emotional states on perceptual and cognitive processes. Yet this approach does not fully capture more dynamic processes at the root of emotional states, with such states lingering beyond the duration of the inducing external stimuli. Our goal was to put in perspective three different types of affective states (induced affective states, more sustained mood states and affective traits such as depression and anxiety) and investigate how they may interact and influence emotion perception. Here, we hypothesized that absorption into positive and negative emotional episodes generate sustained affective states that outlast the episode period and bias the interpretation of facial expressions in a perceptual decision-making task. We also investigated how such effects are influenced by more sustained mood states and by individual affect traits (depression and anxiety) and whether they interact. Transient emotional states were induced using movie-clips, after which participants performed a forced-choice emotion classification task with morphed facial expressions ranging from fear to happiness. Using a psychometric approach, we show that negative (vs. neutral) clips increased participants' propensity to classify ambiguous faces as fearful during several minutes. In contrast, positive movies biased classification toward happiness only for those clips perceived as most absorbing. Negative mood, anxiety and depression had a stronger effect than transient states and increased the propensity to classify ambiguous faces as fearful. These results provide the first evidence that absorption and different temporal dimensions of emotions have a significant effect on how we perceive facial expressions.

The role of the basolateral amygdala in the perception of faces in natural contexts

The amygdala is a complex structure that plays its role in perception and threat-related behaviour by activity of its specific nuclei and their separate networks. In the present functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we investigated the role of the basolateral amygdala in face and context processing. Five individuals with focal basolateral amygdala damage and 12 matched controls viewed fearful or neutral faces in a threatening or neutral context. We tested the hypothesis that basolateral amygdala damage modifies the relation between face and threatening context, triggering threat-related activation in the dorsal stream. The findings supported this hypothesis. First, activation was increased in the right precentral gyrus for threatening versus neutral scenes in the basolateral amygdala damage group compared with the control group. Second, activity in the bilateral middle frontal gyrus, and left anterior inferior parietal lobule was enhanced for neutral faces presented in a threatening versus neutral scene in the group with basolateral amygdala damage compared with controls. These findings provide the first evidence for the neural consequences of basolateral amygdala damage during the processing of complex emotional situations.

The Auditory Kuleshov Effect: Multisensory Integration in Movie Editing

Almost a hundred years ago, the Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov conducted his now famous editing experiment in which different objects were added to a given film scene featuring a neutral face. It is said that the audience interpreted the unchanged facial expression as a function of the added object (e.g., an added soup made the face express hunger). This interaction effect has been dubbed "Kuleshov effect." In the current study, we explored the role of sound in the evaluation of facial expressions in films. Thirty participants watched different clips of faces that were intercut with neutral scenes, featuring either happy music, sad music, or no music at all. This was crossed with the facial expressions of happy, sad, or neutral. We found that the music significantly influenced participants' emotional judgments of facial expression. Thus, the intersensory effects of music are more specific than previously thought. They alter the evaluation of film scenes and can give meaning to ambiguous situations.

Psychophysiological whole-brain network clustering based on connectivity dynamics analysis in naturalistic conditions

We introduce a novel method for delineating context-dependent functional brain networks whose connectivity dynamics are synchronized with the occurrence of a specific psychophysiological process of interest. In this method of context-related network dynamics analysis (CRNDA), a continuous psychophysiological index serves as a reference for clustering the whole-brain into functional networks. We applied CRNDA to fMRI data recorded during the viewing of a sadness-inducing film clip. The method reliably demarcated networks in which temporal patterns of connectivity related to the time series of reported emotional intensity. Our work successfully replicated the link between network connectivity and emotion rating in an independent sample group for seven of the networks. The demarcated networks have clear common functional denominators. Three of these networks overlap with distinct empathy-related networks, previously identified in distinct sets of studies. The other networks are related to sensorimotor processing, language, attention, and working memory. The results indicate that CRNDA, a data-driven method for network clustering that is sensitive to transient connectivity patterns, can productively and reliably demarcate networks that follow psychologically meaningful processes. Hum Brain Mapp 37:4654-4672, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The Effect of Self-Referential Expectation on Emotional Face Processing

The role of self-relevance has been somewhat neglected in static face processing paradigms but may be important in understanding how emotional faces impact on attention, cognition and affect. The aim of the current study was to investigate the effect of self-relevant primes on processing emotional composite faces. Sentence primes created an expectation of the emotion of the face before sad, happy, neutral or composite face photos were viewed. Eye movements were recorded and subsequent responses measured the cognitive and affective impact of the emotion expressed. Results indicated that primes did not guide attention, but impacted on judgments of valence intensity and self-esteem ratings. Negative self-relevant primes led to the most negative self-esteem ratings, although the effect of the prime was qualified by salient facial features. Self-relevant expectations about the emotion of a face and subsequent attention to a face that is congruent with these expectations strengthened the affective impact of viewing the face.

Integrative Processing of Touch and Affect in Social Perception: An fMRI Study

Social perception commonly employs multiple sources of information. The present study aimed at investigating the integrative processing of affective social signals. Task-related and task-free functional magnetic resonance imaging was performed in 26 healthy adult participants during a social perception task concerning dynamic visual stimuli simultaneously depicting facial expressions of emotion and tactile sensations that could be either congruent or incongruent. Confounding effects due to affective valence, inhibitory top-down influences, cross-modal integration, and conflict processing were minimized. The results showed that the perception of congruent, compared to incongruent stimuli, elicited enhanced neural activity in a set of brain regions including left amygdala, bilateral posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), and left superior parietal cortex. These congruency effects did not differ as a function of emotion or sensation. A complementary task-related functional interaction analysis preliminarily suggested that amygdala activity depended on previous processing stages in fusiform gyrus and PCC. The findings provide support for the integrative processing of social information about others' feelings from manifold bodily sources (sensory-affective information) in amygdala and PCC. Given that the congruent stimuli were also judged as being more self-related and more familiar in terms of personal experience in an independent sample of participants, we speculate that such integrative processing might be mediated by the linking of external stimuli with self-experience. Finally, the prediction of task-related responses in amygdala by intrinsic functional connectivity between amygdala and PCC during a task-free state implies a neuro-functional basis for an individual predisposition for the integrative processing of social stimulus content.

Context Effects on Facial Affect Recognition in Schizophrenia and Autism: Behavioral and Eye-Tracking Evidence

Although Schizophrenia (SCZ) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) share impairments in emotion recognition, the mechanisms underlying these impairments may differ. The current study used the novel "Emotions in Context" task to examine how the interpretation and visual inspection of facial affect is modulated by congruent and incongruent emotional contexts in SCZ and ASD. Both adults with SCZ (n= 44) and those with ASD (n= 21) exhibited reduced affect recognition relative to typically-developing (TD) controls (n= 39) when faces were integrated within broader emotional scenes but not when they were presented in isolation, underscoring the importance of using stimuli that better approximate real-world contexts. Additionally, viewing faces within congruent emotional scenes improved accuracy and visual attention to the face for controls more so than the clinical groups, suggesting that individuals with SCZ and ASD may not benefit from the presence of complementary emotional information as readily as controls. Despite these similarities, important distinctions between SCZ and ASD were found. In every condition, IQ was related to emotion-recognition accuracy for the SCZ group but not for the ASD or TD groups. Further, only the ASD group failed to increase their visual attention to faces in incongruent emotional scenes, suggesting a lower reliance on facial information within ambiguous emotional contexts relative to congruent ones. Collectively, these findings highlight both shared and distinct social cognitive processes in SCZ and ASD that may contribute to their characteristic social disabilities.

Emotion-induced loss aversion and striatal-amygdala coupling in low-anxious individuals

Adapting behavior to changes in the environment is a crucial ability for survival but such adaptation varies widely across individuals. Here, we asked how humans alter their economic decision-making in response to emotional cues, and whether this is related to trait anxiety. Developing an emotional decision-making task for functional magnetic resonance imaging, in which gambling decisions were preceded by emotional and non-emotional primes, we assessed emotional influences on loss aversion, the tendency to overweigh potential monetary losses relative to gains. Our behavioral results revealed that only low-anxious individuals exhibited increased loss aversion under emotional conditions. This emotional modulation of decision-making was accompanied by a corresponding emotion-elicited increase in amygdala-striatal functional connectivity, which correlated with the behavioral effect across participants. Consistent with prior reports of ‘neural loss aversion’, both amygdala and ventral striatum tracked losses more strongly than gains, and amygdala loss aversion signals were exaggerated by emotion, suggesting a potential role for this structure in integrating value and emotion cues. Increased loss aversion and striatal-amygdala coupling induced by emotional cues may reflect the engagement of adaptive harm-avoidance mechanisms in low-anxious individuals, possibly promoting resilience to psychopathology.

Is it the picture or is it the frame? An fMRI study on the neurobiology of framing effects

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) we investigated whether a culturally defined context modulates the neurocognitive processing of artworks. We presented subjects with paintings from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, and labeled them as being either from the MoMA or from an adult education center. Irrespective of aesthetic appreciation, we found higher neural activation in the left precuneus, superior and inferior parietal cortex for the MoMA condition compared to the control label condition. When taking the aesthetic preference for a painting into account, the MoMA condition elicited higher involvement of right precuneus, bilateral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and temporoparietal junction (TPJ). Our findings indicate that mental frames, in particular labels of social value, modulate both cognitive and affective aspects of sensory processing.

Childhood Poverty Predicts Adult Amygdala and Frontal Activity and Connectivity in Response to Emotional Faces

Childhood poverty negatively impacts physical and mental health in adulthood. Altered brain development in response to social and environmental factors associated with poverty likely contributes to this effect, engendering maladaptive patterns of social attribution and/or elevated physiological stress. In this fMRI study, we examined the association between childhood poverty and neural processing of social signals (i.e., emotional faces) in adulthood. Fifty-two subjects from a longitudinal prospective study recruited as children, participated in a brain imaging study at 23–25 years of age using the Emotional Faces Assessment Task. Childhood poverty, independent of concurrent adult income, was associated with higher amygdala and medial prefrontal cortical (mPFC) responses to threat vs. happy faces. Also, childhood poverty was associated with decreased functional connectivity between left amygdala and mPFC. This study is unique, because it prospectively links childhood poverty to emotional processing during adulthood, suggesting a candidate neural mechanism for negative social-emotional bias. Adults who grew up poor appear to be more sensitive to social threat cues and less sensitive to positive social cues.

The ecology of human fear: survival optimization and the nervous system

We propose a Survival Optimization System (SOS) to account for the strategies that humans and other animals use to defend against recurring and novel threats. The SOS attempts to merge ecological models that define a repertoire of contextually relevant threat induced survival behaviors with contemporary approaches to human affective science. We first propose that the goal of the nervous system is to reduce surprise and optimize actions by (i) predicting the sensory landscape by simulating possible encounters with threat and selecting the appropriate pre-encounter action and (ii) prevention strategies in which the organism manufactures safe environments. When a potential threat is encountered the (iii) threat orienting system is engaged to determine whether the organism ignores the stimulus or switches into a process of (iv) threat assessment, where the organism monitors the stimulus, weighs the threat value, predicts the actions of the threat, searches for safety, and guides behavioral actions crucial to directed escape. When under imminent attack, (v) defensive systems evoke fast reflexive indirect escape behaviors (i.e., fight or flight). This cascade of responses to threat of increasing magnitude are underwritten by an interconnected neural architecture that extends from cortical and hippocampal circuits, to attention, action and threat systems including the amygdala, striatum, and hard-wired defensive systems in the midbrain. The SOS also includes a modulatory feature consisting of cognitive appraisal systems that flexibly guide perception, risk and action. Moreover, personal and vicarious threat encounters fine-tune avoidance behaviors via model-based learning, with higher organisms bridging data to reduce face-to-face encounters with predators. Our model attempts to unify the divergent field of human affective science, proposing a highly integrated nervous system that has evolved to increase the organism's chances of survival.

Emotion recognition in borderline personality disorder: effects of emotional information on negative bias

BACKGROUND

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is characterized by severe deficits in social interactions, which might be linked to deficits in emotion recognition. Research on emotion recognition abilities in BPD revealed heterogeneous results, ranging from deficits to heightened sensitivity. The most stable findings point to an impairment in the evaluation of neutral facial expressions as neutral, as well as to a negative bias in emotion recognition; that is the tendency to attribute negative emotions to neutral expressions, or in a broader sense to report a more negative emotion category than depicted. However, it remains unclear which contextual factors influence the occurrence of this negative bias. Previous studies suggest that priming by preceding emotional information and also constrained processing time might augment the emotion recognition deficit in BPD.

METHODS

To test these assumptions, 32 female BPD patients and 31 healthy females, matched for age and education, participated in an emotion recognition study, in which every facial expression was preceded by either a positive, neutral or negative scene. Furthermore, time constraints for processing were varied by presenting the facial expressions with short (100 ms) or long duration (up to 3000 ms) in two separate blocks.

RESULTS

BPD patients showed a significant deficit in emotion recognition for neutral and positive facial expression, associated with a significant negative bias. In BPD patients, this emotion recognition deficit was differentially affected by preceding emotional information and time constraints, with a greater influence of emotional information during long face presentations and a greater influence of neutral information during short face presentations.

CONCLUSIONS

Our results are in line with previous findings supporting the existence of a negative bias in emotion recognition in BPD patients, and provide further insights into biased social perceptions in BPD patients.

The influence of a working memory task on affective perception of facial expressions

In a dual-task paradigm, participants performed a spatial location working memory task and a forced two-choice perceptual decision task (neutral vs. fearful) with gradually morphed emotional faces (neutral ∼ fearful). Task-irrelevant word distractors (negative, neutral, and control) were experimentally manipulated during spatial working memory encoding. We hypothesized that, if affective perception is influenced by concurrent cognitive load using a working memory task, task-irrelevant emotional distractors would bias subsequent perceptual decision-making on ambiguous facial expression. We found that when either neutral or negative emotional words were presented as task-irrelevant working-memory distractors, participants more frequently reported fearful face perception - but only at the higher emotional intensity levels of morphed faces. Also, the affective perception bias due to negative emotional distractors correlated with a decrease in working memory performance. Taken together, our findings suggest that concurrent working memory load by task-irrelevant distractors has an impact on affective perception of facial expressions.

From naturalistic neuroscience to modeling radical embodiment with narrative enactive systems

Mainstream cognitive neuroscience has begun to accept the idea of embodied mind, which assumes that the human mind is fundamentally constituted by the dynamical interactions of the brain, body, and the environment. In today's paradigm of naturalistic neurosciences, subjects are exposed to rich contexts, such as video sequences or entire films, under relatively controlled conditions, against which researchers can interpret changes in neural responses within a time window. However, from the point of view of radical embodied cognitive neuroscience, the increasing complexity alone will not suffice as the explanatory apparatus for dynamical embodiment and situatedness of the mind. We suggest that narrative enactive systems with dynamically adaptive content as stimuli, may serve better to account for the embodied mind engaged with the surrounding world. Among the ensuing challenges for neuroimaging studies is how to interpret brain data against broad temporal contexts of previous experiences that condition the unfolding experience of nowness. We propose means to tackle this issue, as well as ways to limit the exponentially growing combinatoria of narrative paths to a controllable number.

Social closeness and feedback modulate susceptibility to the framing effect

Although we often seek social feedback (SFB) from others to help us make decisions, little is known about how SFB affects decisions under risk, particularly from a close peer. We conducted two experiments using an established framing task to probe how decision-making is modulated by SFB valence (positive, negative) and the level of closeness with feedback provider (friend, confederate). Participants faced mathematically equivalent decisions framed as either an opportunity to keep (gain frame) or lose (loss frame) part of an initial endowment. Periodically, participants were provided with positive (e.g., "Nice!") or negative (e.g., "Lame!") feedback about their choices. Such feedback was provided by either a confederate (Experiment 1) or a gender-matched close friend (Experiment 2). As expected, the framing effect was observed in both experiments. Critically, an individual's susceptibility to the framing effect was modulated by the valence of the SFB, but only when the feedback provider was a close friend. This effect was reflected in the activation patterns of ventromedial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex, regions involved in complex decision-making. Taken together, these results highlight social closeness as an important factor in understanding the impact of SFB on neural mechanisms of decision-making.

Different brain activity in response to emotional faces alone and augmented by contextual information

This study examined the extent to which emotional face stimuli differ from the neural reactivity associated with more ecological contextually augmented stimuli. Participants were scanned when they viewed contextually rich pictures depicting both emotional faces and context, and pictures of emotional faces presented alone. Emotional faces alone were more strongly associated with brain activity in paralimbic and social information processing regions, whereas emotional faces augmented by context were associated with increased and sustained activity in regions potentially representing increased complexity and subjective emotional experience. Furthermore, context effects were modulated by emotional intensity and valence. These findings suggest that cortical elaboration that is apparent in contextually augmented stimuli may be missed in studies of emotional faces alone, whereas emotional faces may more selectively recruit limbic reactivity.

Overlapping and distinct representations of advantageous and disadvantageous inequality

Advantageous inequality (AI) aversion, or paying at a personal cost to achieve equal reward distribution, represents a unique feature of human behavior. Here, we show that individuals have strong preferences for fairness in both disadvantageous (DI) and advantageous inequality (AI) situations, such that they alter others' payoff at a personal financial cost. At the neural level, we found that both types of inequality activated the putamen, orbitofrontal cortex, and insula, regions implicated in motivation. Individual difference analyses found that those who spent more money to increase others' payoff had stronger activity in putamen when they encountered AI and less functional connectivity between putamen and both orbitofrontal cortex and anterior insula. Conversely, those who spent more money to reduce others' payoff had stronger activity in amygdala in response to DI and less functional connectivity between amygdala and ventral anterior cingulate cortex. These dissociations suggest that both types of inequality are processed by similar brain areas, yet modulated by different neural pathways. Hum Brain Mapp 35:3290–3301, 2014. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Disambiguation of ambiguous figures in the brain

Disambiguation refers to the ability to interpret ambiguous information in a sensible way, which is important in an ever-changing external environment. Disambiguation occurs when prior knowledge is given before an ambiguous stimulus is presented. For example, labeling a series of meaningless blobs as a “human body” can change the observer's perception. The aim of this experiment was to study the neural circuitry underlying disambiguation caused by prior knowledge. We presented to participants a series of meaningless blobs with different contextual information. As participants performed this task, we used magnetoencephalography to map the brain areas that were activated when participants perceived blobs as a human body. The participants were presented identical sets of blob stimuli, and were instructed that a human body would appear more frequently in the “high body” condition than in the “low body” condition. We found the blob stimuli were more frequently perceived as the human body when they were presented in the “high body” condition. Such contextual modulation correlated with activity in the extrastriate body area (EBA) and the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). Furthermore, we observed that IFG activation preceded EBA activation. These findings suggest that top-down processing in the IFG plays a role in disambiguating ambiguous information and modifying an individual's perceptions.

A neuroimaging investigation of attribute framing and individual differences

Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to evaluate the neural basis of framing effects. We tested the reflexive and reflective systems model of social cognition as it relates to framing. We also examined the relationships among frame susceptibility, intelligence and personality measures. Participants evaluated whether personal attributes applied to themselves from multiple perspectives and in positive and negative frames. Participants rated whether each statement was descriptive or not and endorsed positive frames more than negative frames. Individual differences on frame decisions enabled us to form high and low frame susceptibility groups. Endorsement of frame-consistent attributes was associated with personality factors, cognitive reflection and intelligence. Reflexive brain regions were associated with positive frames while reflective areas were associated with negative frames. Region of Interest analyses showed that frame-inconsistent responses were associated with increased activation within reflective cognitive control regions including the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC), dorsomedial PFC and left ventrolateral PFC. Frame-consistent responses were associated with increased activation in the right orbitofrontal cortex. These results demonstrate that individual differences in frame susceptibility influence personal attribute evaluations. Overall, this study clarifies the neural correlates of the reflective and reflexive systems of social cognition as applied to decisions about social attributions.

How affective information from faces and scenes interacts in the brain

Facial expression perception can be influenced by the natural visual context in which the face is perceived. We performed an fMRI experiment presenting participants with fearful or neutral faces against threatening or neutral background scenes. Triangles and scrambled scenes served as control stimuli. The results showed that the valence of the background influences face selective activity in the right anterior parahippocampal place area (PPA) and subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC) with higher activation for neutral backgrounds compared to threatening backgrounds (controlled for isolated background effects) and that this effect correlated with trait empathy in the sgACC. In addition, the left fusiform gyrus (FG) responds to the affective congruence between face and background scene. The results show that valence of the background modulates face processing and support the hypothesis that empathic processing in sgACC is inhibited when affective information is present in the background. In addition, the findings reveal a pattern of complex scene perception showing a gradient of functional specialization along the posterior-anterior axis: from sensitivity to the affective content of scenes (extrastriate body area: EBA and posterior PPA), over scene emotion-face emotion interaction (left FG) via category-scene interaction (anterior PPA) to scene-category-personality interaction (sgACC).

An intact social cognitive process in schizophrenia: situational context effects on perception of facial affect

BACKGROUND

Impaired facial affect recognition is the most consistent social cognitive finding in schizophrenia. Although social situations provide powerful constraints on our perception, little is known about how situational context modulates facial affect recognition in schizophrenia.

METHODS

Study 1 was a single-site study with 34 schizophrenia patients and 22 healthy controls. Study 2 was a 2-site study with 68 schizophrenia patients and 28 controls. Both studies administered a Situational Context Facial Affect Recognition Task with 2 conditions: a situational context condition and a no-context condition. For the situational context condition, a briefly shown face was preceded by a sentence describing either a fear- or surprise-inducing event. In the no-context condition, a face was presented without a sentence. For both conditions, subjects rated how fearful or surprised the face appeared on a 9-point Likert scale.

RESULTS

For the situational context condition of study 1, both patients and controls rated faces as more afraid when they were paired with fear-inducing sentences and as more surprised when they were paired with surprise-inducing sentences. The degree of modulation was comparable across groups. For the no-context condition, patients rated faces comparably to controls. The findings of study 2 replicated those from study 1.

CONCLUSIONS

Despite previous abnormalities in other types of context paradigms, this study found intact situational context processing in schizophrenia, suggesting that patients benefit from situational context when interpreting ambiguous facial expression. This area of relative social cognitive strength in schizophrenia has implications for social cognitive training programs.

Contextual influences on dynamic facial expressions

Participants viewed dynamic facial expressions that moved from a neutral expression to varying degrees of angry, happy, or sad or from these emotionally expressive faces to neutral.A contrast effect was observed for expressions that moved to a neutral state. That is, a neutral expression that began as angry was rated as having a mildly positive expression, whereas the same neutral expression was rated as negatively valenced when it began with a smile. In Experiment 2, static expressions presented sequentially elicited contrast effects, but they were weaker than those following dynamic expressions. Experiment 3 assessed a broad range of facial movements across varying degrees of angry and happy expressions. We observed momentum effects for movements that ended at mildly expressive points (25% and 50% expressive). For such movements, affect ratings were higher, as if the perceived expression moved beyond their endpoint. Experiment 4 assessed sad facial expressions and found both contrast and momentum effects for dynamic expressions to and from sad faces. These findings demonstrate new and potent contextual influences on dynamic facial expressions and highlight the importance of facial movements in social-emotional communication.