Author: Nhi Ngo

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 113

ISBN-13:

Emotion perception of facial expressions is an essential tool to navigate the social world. Facial expressions are not stand-alone entities but are embedded in environments rich with cues that contextualize the emotion expressed on the face. Investigating how context is utilized as a function of perceiver- and target-associated cues will help us understand the mechanism through which context is incorporated into emotion perception. In this dissertation, I considered age, top-down control, and stereotyping as perceiver-associated contexts that can interact with target-associated contexts such as cue relevance and target's race to produce individual differences in context utilization in emotion perception. Study 1 investigated whether context can be attended spontaneously if the relevance of the contextual cue was manipulated, and whether older adults (n = 40), due to their inhibition decline, would be more influenced by context than younger adults (n = 43) even when the context was not relevant to the target. Younger and older adults were either instructed that the background scene was relevant or irrelevant to the embedded facial expression. Regardless of instruction about context relevance, participants were influenced by context. However, this contextual effect was much more pronounced in the relevant context than the irrelevant context condition. These results supported the hypothesis that attention to context is not fully spontaneous, and that a perceiver is capable of inhibiting their attention to context when they consider the context irrelevant to the target facial expressions. Study 2 examined whether context effects would be attenuated if the target belonged to a social outgroup and expressed an emotion that was stereotypically believed to be representative of that group. In this study, White younger (n = 51) and older adults (n = 50) judged facial expressions of White and Black individuals embedded in emotionally congruent and incongruent context. Older adults were expected to exhibit more prejudice and stereotyping behaviors, and consequently would be less influenced by context when the target was Black than when the target was White. Results revealed that context effects were evident for both Black and White targets. Despite the stereotypical association between Black and angry, both younger and older adults were more influenced by context when the target was Black, regardless of the target's emotion. Participants appeared to have both low prejudice and sufficient motivation to correct for possible stereotypical association between Black and anger by using the "disgusted" label for Black angry faces. Executive functioning predicted how influenced by context younger adults were when the target was Black and angry, but did not predict the same for White angry targets. Better executive functioning, which includes better inhibition abilities, might have facilitated inhibition of stereotypes for perceivers with the best executive functioning abilities. No difference was found within older adults. This dissertation demonstrated the importance of integrating different types of contextual cues from both the perceiver and the target, as they can interact to modulate the pattern of context effects on emotion perception. The emotion and the race of the target, the presumed relevance of the context, as well as the perceiver's inhibition abilities all play a role in determining the magnitude of context effects. The current studies also highlight the role of aging in contextualized emotion perception. While the scientific process requires isolating variables so their effects are not confounded, and despite the definite benefits of studying facial expressions in isolation, emotion perception in real life never functions without context. Context effects, as have been shown in this dissertation, vary with different perceiver- and target- associated factors. Studying context can only further our understanding of the complex phenomenon of emotion perception, and how it can help us efficiently navigate the busy, multi-cue social world.