Context influence in emotion perception across the lifespan

Emotion perception of facial expressions is an essential tool to navigate the social world. Facial expressions are not stand-alone entities but are embedded in environments rich with cues that contextualize the emotion expressed on the face. Investigating how context is utilized as a function of perceiver- and target-associated cues will help us understand the mechanism through which context is incorporated into emotion perception. In this dissertation, I considered age, top-down control, and stereotyping as perceiver-associated contexts that can interact with target-associated contexts such as cue relevance and target's race to produce individual differences in context utilization in emotion perception.