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.

本研究检验了情感情境对肖像画中情感面部表情评估的影响。在拍摄目标肖像画之前，先呈现了令人愉快，不愉快和中立的环境照片。参与者的任务是查看肖像画并选择适合绘画主题的情感标签。实验1的结果表明，在令人愉悦的语境之前，肖像中的面孔被标记为更快乐。当出现不愉快的环境时，它们被标记为不那么快乐，悲伤和恐惧。在实验2中，当以低于阈值的20 ms SOA呈现上下文照片时，标记效果消失了。在这两个实验中，情境都会影响处理时间，对于宜人的情境，时间会变慢，对于令人不悦的情境，时间会变快。