Accurately and quickly recognizing the emotional faces of others is ecologically important for human survival and reproduction. Recognition of emotional faces is affected by scene context, and emotion words as a special scene context also affect individuals’ recognition of others’ emotional faces. In this paper, we focus on the valence and semanteme dimensions of emotion words to explore the important role of emotion words on the recognition of emotional faces, as well as the preliminary exploration of their mental processing mechanisms. Future research should further explore the role of emotion words with different processing depths on emotional face recognition.