ON THE CLARITY OF EXPRESSIVE AND CONTEXTUAL INFORMATION IN THE RECOGNITION OF EMOTIONS - A METHODOLOGICAL CRITIQUE

Ekman, Friesen and Ellsworth's (1982b) influential review on emotional expression and context prescribed the current standard criteria for selecting clear and comparable faces and contexts. These recommendations might not pay enough attention to the peculiarities of contextual information. Criteria of clarity for contextual stimuli should be grounded in the process of categorization of social situations (e.g. prototypicality and salience). A set of criteria of contextual clarity were designed according to this line of argument. The resulting contextual stimuli were employed in a replication of Wallbott's (1988) experiment on recognition of emotions through discrepant sources of information. In contrast with previous studies, subjects' judgments were equally predictable from expression and context.