Long-Term Influence of Incidental Emotions on the Emotional Judgment of Neutral Faces.

Evidence indicates that the processing of facial stimuli may be influenced by incidental factors, and these influences are particularly powerful when facial expressions are ambiguous, such as neutral faces. However, limited research investigated whether emotional contextual information presented in a preceding and unrelated experiment could be pervasively carried over to another experiment to modulate neutral face processing. The present study aims to investigate whether an emotional text presented in a first experiment could generate negative emotion toward neutral faces in a second experiment unrelated to the previous experiment.