Affective theory of mind inferences contextually influence the recognition of emotional facial expressions

ABSTRACTThe recognition of emotional facial expressionsis often subject to contextual influence, particularly when the face and the context convey similar emotions. We investigated whether spontaneous, incidental affective theoryof mindinferences made while reading vignettes describing social situations would produce context effectson the identification of same- valencedemotions (Experiment 1) as well as differently- valencedemotions (Experiment 2) conveyed by subsequently presented faces. Crucially, we found an effect of context on reaction times in both experiments while, in line with previous work, we found evidence for a context effecton accuracy only in Experiment 1. This demonstrates that affective theoryof mindinferences made at the pragmatic level of a text can automatically, contextually influence the perceptual processing of emotional facial expressionsin a separate task even when those emotions are of a distinctive valence. Thus, our novel findings suggest that language acts as a contex...