| 其他摘要 | Accurately interpreting others’ facial emotions is of particular importance for human beings. Growing evidence has indicated that facial emotion recognition is inherently contextualized and may automatically incorporate affective information from the context. Existing research mainly concentrated on how contextual information modulates emotion perception at the conscious level; however, exploring whether and how this contextual effect can occur at the nonconscious level from multiple perspectives will provide a more comprehensive understanding of the mechanism for emotional information integration. In the following four studies, we systematically investigated the cognitive and neural mechanisms of the nonconscious affective contextual effect.
In study 1, we investigated whether the affective contextual effect can occur in the absence of visual awareness and addressed the similarities and differences between nonconscious and conscious affective contextual effects. We found that the perceived emotion of a visible target face was biased toward the expression of the concurrently presented invisible contextual face. More importantly, the fearful contexts biased perception only in the invisible condition, whereas the happy face contexts influenced perception regardless of whether or not observers were aware of the contexts. These results altogether indicate that the affective contextual effect can occur out of awareness and the influence of fearful face contexts was restricted to the nonconscious level.
In Study 2, we introduced a social cue (i.e., eye gaze direction) and included the trait anxiety of the participant, further exploring the specificity of nonconscious affective contextual effect in a compound social scene. At the nonconscious level, we found that the nonconscious affective contextual modulation depends on the gaze direction of the target face. Particularly, a target face gazing toward a contextual face induced a larger affective contextual effect than a face gazing away. Furthermore, this gaze modulation effect specifically occurred for invisible fearful but not happy contexts and hinged on individual trait anxiety levels. At the conscious level, the affective contextual effect was not modulated by the direction of gaze. Collectively, these results demonstrated that social information delivered by gaze cues can modulate the affective contextual effect without awareness in a fear- and anxiety- specific manner.
In Study 3, by using the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technique, we further examined the nonconscious affective contextual effect in a compound social scene at the neural level. Given the specific results found in Study 2, we only focused on the fearful affective contextual effect induced by individuals with high trait anxiety. We found that the amygdala is involved in the gaze-mediated nonconscious affective contextual effect in a social scene. Specifically, the fearful affective contexts induced a stronger response to the right amygdala relative to the neutral contexts, and this effect was mediated by the gaze direction of the target face ( gaze toward versus gaze away from context). These findings suggest that the amygdala may be the core brain area responsible for the automatic integration of emotional and social information in individuals with high trait anxiety.
In study 4, we examined the affective contextual effect when the target and the contextual faces were totally suppressed from awareness. Taking advantage of the “pop- out” phenomenon in the visual search paradigm, we examined this effect from a functional (i.e., attention capture) perspective. In addition, this study also examined the impact of trait anxiety. Behavioral results found that the invisible fearful face popped out of the neutral contextual faces and speeded up target detection at the pop-out location, yielding faster responses in the pop-out condition relative to the non-pop-out condition. Crucially, such influence was only observed in the high trait anxiety individuals. Invisible happy faces did not exhibit the same salience effect as fearful faces. Evidence from eye movements confirmed the behavioral results and further revealed that the pop-out effect which is specific to high-trait anxiety and fearful faces can occur when the target and contexts were completely invisible. This study showed that the invisible contextual faces can affect the attention to the invisible target face, and this kind of affective contextual effect was specific to fear and high trait anxiety.
In summary, the current findings provide compelling evidence for the automaticity of the affective contextual effect and shed light on the specific mechanism for the nonconscious integration of socio-affective information from the behavioral and neurological levels. |
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