Are adaptation aftereffects for facial emotional expressions affected by prior knowledge about the emotion?

Accurate perception of the emotional signals conveyed by others is crucial for successful social interaction. Such perception is influenced not only by sensory input, but also by knowledge we have about the others' emotions. This study addresses the issue of whether knowing that the other's emotional state is congruent or incongruent with their displayed emotional expression ("genuine" and "fake", respectively) affects the neural mechanisms underpinning the perception of their facial emotional expressions. We used a visual adaptation paradigm to investigate this question in three experiments employing increasing adaptation durations. The adapting stimuli consisted of photographs of emotional facial expressions of joy and anger, purported to reflect (in-)congruency between felt and expressed emotion, displayed by professional actors. A Validity checking procedure ensured participants had the correct knowledge about the (in-)congruency. Significantly smaller adaptation aftereffects were obtained when participants knew that the displayed expression was incongruent with the felt emotion, following all tested adaptation periods. This study shows that knowledge relating to the congruency between felt and expressed emotion modulates face expression aftereffects. We argue that this reflects that the neural substrate responsible for the perception of facial expressions of emotion incorporates the presumed felt emotion underpinning the expression.