Running head : LAUGHTER AND CRYING IN CONTEXT 1

It is well established that categorizing the emotional content of facial expressions may differ depending on contextual information. Whether this malleability is observed in the auditory domain and in genuine emotion expressions is poorly explored. We examined the perception of authentic laughter and crying in the context of happy, neutral and sad facial expressions. Participants rated the vocalizations on separate unipolar scales of happiness and sadness, and on arousal. Although they were instructed to focus exclusively on the vocalizations, consistent context effects were found: For both laughter and crying, emotion judgments were shifted towards the information expressed by the face. These modulations were independent of response latencies and were larger for more emotionally ambiguous vocalizations. No effects of context were found for arousal ratings. These findings suggest that the automatic encoding of contextual information during emotion perception generalizes across modalities, to purely nonverbal vocalizations, and is not confined to acted expressions.