Affective Context and the Interpretation of Facial Expressions in Portrait Paintings

The present study examined the effects of affective context on evaluation of facial expression of emotion in portrait paintings. Pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral context photographs were presented prior to target portrait paintings. The participants’ task was to view the portrait painting and choose an emotion label that fit the subject of the painting. The results from Experiment 1 indicated that when preceded by pleasant context, the faces in the portraits were labeled as happier. When preceded by unpleasant context, they were labeled as less happy, sadder, and more fearful. In Experiment 2, the labeling effects disappeared when context photographs were presented at a subthreshold 20 ms SOA. In both experiments, context affected processing times, with times slower for pleasant context and faster for unpleasant context. The results suggest that the context effects depend on both automatic and controlled processing of affective content contained in context photographs.