Hosted by the School of Psychological Science
Abstract: Facial expressions provide important social information about another person and help guide our social interactions. The recognition of facial expressions is therefore critical in navigating the social world. Most previous research has studied the perception of isolated faces. However, in our everyday lives, we normally encounter faces within the context of other social signals. One of the most basic but fundamental social signals that typically accompanies facial expressions in the real world is body posture. A small but growing body of research indicates that body posture has an important contextual influence on facial expression perception, such that perception of facial expression is biased towards the body emotion. However, to date, the underlying mechanisms of this influence are not well understood. In my talk, I will describe a series of studies trying to understand the perceptual, computational, and neural mechanisms underpinning the influence of body context on facial expression perception. I will discuss findings across typical and atypical development, and in adulthood, and consider how the results can inform our understanding of social perception more generally.