Abstract:  Traditionally, the recognition of facial expression was studied by using isolated faces, which was affected by the categorical theory of emotion. In fact, in real life, facial expression always occurs in context. The result of facial expression recognition could be ambiguous when observer typically viewed face in isolation without any other cues. Recently many researches investigated how context may influence the facial expression processing. Numerous studies found context effect in recognition of facial expression, namely visual scene, body expression, emotional concept and surrounding other faces all shaped the facial expression processing. Evidence from ERPs and eye movements showed that facial expression was combined with both of emotional visual scene and body expression during the early stage of processing, and to some degree, was automatic. But none of these studies investigated the role they played simultaneously. Moreover, studies of context effect in recognition of facial expression seldom investigated the recognition of visual scene directly by using memory paradigm. Given that emotional concept may provide a top-down constraint in facial expression recognition, in the current study, we increased number of emotion labels for a better understanding of the context effect. Two experiments were conducted in this study, both of them adopted a 2 (facial expression: disgust, fear)×2(emotion congruent between face and context: congruent, incongruent) within-subject design. Stimuli were made up by images of disgust and fear (low level of perceptual similarity) facial expression, visual scene and body expression. All participants were required to label an emotion word for the face which was shown against backgrounds of visual scene (Exp1) or both visual scene and body expression (Exp2). Experiment 1 aimed to study the effect of emotion congruent between facial expression and visual scene on facial expression recognition. On the basis of experiment 1, experiment 2 added congruent or incongruent body expression to investigate whether body expression disturbed the effect of visual scene on facial expression recognition. Results of the two experiments indicate that: (1)The influence of visual scene on facial expression recognition is still significant when increased the number of emotion labels; (2)Participants would rely more on visual scene and remember the scene more often when emotional facial expression is shown against an incongruent visual scene; (3)The effect of visual scene on facial expression recognition can be influenced by body expression, but the emotion of visual scene still play an important role in recognition of negative facial expression

Key words:  facial expression recognition, context effect, visual scene, body expression