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Abstract

Previous research on the perception of facial expression has highlighted the importance of context. For instance, affective body posture influences perception of facial expression, such that observers are more likely to perceive a disgusted face as ‘angry’ when presented in the context of an angry body. This integration of face and body emotion cues is highly variable across individuals, offering an opportunity to study the mechanisms underlying integrated whole-person perception. Using standard psychophysical tasks in combination with computational modelling, we indexed the precision of representations of isolated facial expression and body posture cues, as well as the influence of each cue on the integrated whole-person percept of emotion. The results indicate that the perceptual integration that leads to a whole-person representation is determined by the precision of the individual cues. These results provide the basis for developing a mechanistic model of how facial expression and body posture cues are combined to create integrated whole-person percepts of emotion, and have important implications for our understanding of real-world individual differences in social perception.