Inferential emotion tracking (IET) reveals the critical role of context in emotion recognition

The ability to recognize others' emotions is critical for social interactions. It is widely assumed that recognizing facial expressions predominantly determines perceived categorical emotion, and contextual information only coarsely modulates or disambiguates interpreted faces. Using a novel method, inferential emotion tracking, we isolated and quantified the contribution of visual context versus face and body information in dynamic emotion recognition. Even when faces and bodies were blurred out in muted videos, observers inferred the emotion of invisible characters accurately and in high agreement based solely on visual context. Our results further show that the presence of visual context can override interpreted emotion categories from face and body information. Strikingly, we find that visual context determines perceived emotion nearly as much and as often as face and body information does. Visual context is an essential and indispensable element of emotion recognition: Without context, observers can misperceive a person's emotion over time. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).