Literature suggests that relatively simple stimuli such as emotional facial expressions elicit neural activation in subcortical-limbic regions whereas contextually richer emotional pictures generate activation in a broader network of prefrontal as well as subcortical-limbic regions. The extent to which contextual features modulate subjective and neural responses associated with responses to emotional faces is unclear. Normative valence and arousal ratings for a large corpus of affective pictures (IAPS) were reviewed to explore whether emotional pictures containing both faces and context evoked more intense subjective emotional reactions than faces presented alone. This review study demonstrated that subjective emotional reactions to emotional faces with contextual information were greater than those to faces. An fMRI study was conducted to examine neural reactivity to these two types of emotional stimuli. Eleven healthy right-handed subjects viewed passively emotional stimuli during event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) assessment. Emotional faces augmented by contextual information elicited significant brain activity in the prefrontal cortex (BA10/11/47) as well as amygdala and thalamus. In contrast, emotional facial expressions provoked neural responses only in the subcortical-limbic/paralimbic regions including amygdala, thalamus, insula and posterior cingulate gyrus. These findings suggest that there are different but overlapping brain networks engaged by emotional faces and faces augmented by contextual information. The amygdala and thalamus can be regarded as common regions associated with emotional processing. Prefrontal regions may be unique in more cognitive and conscious processing of emotional faces augmented by contextual information.