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The social context—seeing people emotionally interacting—is one of the most common contexts in which emotion perception occurs. Despite its importance, emotion perception of social interactions from a 3rd-person perspective is poorly understood. Here we investigated whether emotion recognition of fear and anger is facilitated by mere congruency (the contextual figure exhibits the same emotion as the target) or by functional relations (the contextual figure exhibits a complementary emotion to the target). Furthermore, we examined which expression channel, face or body, drives social context effects. In the 1st 2 experiments (Studies 1a and 1b), participants in an online survey platform (N= 146) or university students (N= 34), viewed interacting figures displaying fear or anger, presented either as faces, bodies, or both. Participants were instructed to categorize the target figure’s emotions while the other figure …