American International Journal of Social Science

The Effect of Contextual Information and Emotional Clarity on Emotional Evaluation
Fada Pan, Leyuan Li, Yanyan Zhang, Li Zhang, Yuhong Ou

Abstract
The present study aimed to investigate the effect of contextual information and emotional clarity on valence and employed a three-factor mixed design in which participants were required to view the picture combined with athlete’s facial expression and contextual information, and then to evaluate the emotional intensity of the athlete’s expression using a 7-point scale. The results showed that the matched contextual information enhanced the emotional evaluation to the facial expression, namely making the valence of winning facial expression more positive and the losing more negative, and that the non-matched contextual information weakened the emotional evaluation. More importantly, the emotional evaluation was even reversed by the non-matched contextual information when the emotional clarity was lower. The results suggested that the matched contextual information had an “exaggeration effect” on valence and that the influence of non-matched context on emotional evaluation was more significantly impacted by the emotional clarity.

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