Top-down influences on the perception of emotional stimuli

The ability to quickly and accurately perceive external emotional stimuli — events in the environment that evoke changes in feelings, physiology and behaviour — is vital for adaptive social interactions and effective decision making in everyday life. Contemporary theories of emotional perception emphasize the influence of top-down information (such as prior knowledge and context) in shaping the perception of emotional stimuli. However, experimental research has mainly focused on the automatic, bottom-up aspects that are driven by the stimuli themselves (such as salience). Research in the adjacent field of visual perception has used behavioural, computational and neuroimaging techniques to reveal how prior knowledge aids perception in a top-down manner. In this Review, we explore studies that leverage similar methods to demonstrate how top-down influences — including social and emotional attention, expectations and context — shape the perception of emotional stimuli. In doing so, we aim to promote the development of comprehensive models that incorporate top-down factors with bottom-up factors to explain the perception of emotional stimuli.