The general purpose of this thesis was to investigate the specific effect of social contextual information on emotion recognition. We present empirical evidence demonstrating that (i) automatic socioaffective inferences have a strong impact on emotion recognition, (ii) the mere presence of social information influences emotion recognition in persons with social anxiety, and, (iii) even without explicit social or emotional content, social stereotypes associated with uniforms influence emotions perceived on faces. Our findings highlight the importance of social information in providing useful information for processing ambiguous emotional expressions. Emotion recognition models should specifically incorporate the notion that socioaffective inferences are automatically integrated into the dynamic emotion recognition process. Theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.