Words are a context for mental inference

Accumulating evidence indicates that context has an important impact on inferring emotion in facial configurations. In this paper, we report on three studies examining whether words referring to mental states contribute to mental inference in images from the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (Study 1), Baron-Cohen et al. (2001) in static emoji (Study 2), and in animated emoji (Study 3). Across all three studies, we predicted and found that perceivers were more likely to infer mental states when relevant words were embedded in the experimental context (i.e., in a forced-choice task) versus when those words were absent (i.e., in a free-labeling task). We discuss the implications of these findings for the widespread conclusion that faces or parts of faces "display" emotions or other mental states, as well as for psychology's continued reliance on forced-choice methods. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).