Recognition of Contextually Threat-Related Scenes is Enhanced by Preceding Emotionally Incongruent Facial Expression

Previous studies on intentional and incidental face memory have investigated the effects of emotional facial expression on facial recognition itself. However, it is still uncertain whether facial expression influences later recognition of other emotional stimuli, such as emotional scenes. To address this issue, participants during the encoding phase were presented with emotional scenes together with facial expressions. The emotion of the scenes was either congruent or incongruent with that of the facial expression. In order to increase the attention towards faces/facial expressions, the task was related to faces rather than scenes, for example, the participants were asked either to memorize the facial identities (intentional face learning, Experiment 1) or to identify the gender of the faces (incidental face learning, Experiment 2). Subsequently, the participants were asked to perform an unexpected old/new recognition task regarding the scene pictures. In general, the results showed that recognition of threat-related scenes was enhanced by a preceding emotionally incongruent facial expression irrespective of intentional or incidental face learning. The findings indicate that facial expression influences recognition of contextual threat-related scenes.