Humans are social beings and express a strong and innate need to form interpersonal relationships with others. Face processing and expression recognition play a crucial and communicative role in this process as expressions contain essential information and assist in conveying a person's emotional state. Positive expressions like happiness are recognised faster than negative expressions like anger or fear, the happy face advantage. Character information alters expression recognition in that a larger happy face advantage is observed for faces paired with positive character information than for those paired with negative character information. The present study investigated the effect of pairing faces with positive, negative, or negative health-related words on expression recognition.The training phase consisted of participants viewing neutral faces paired with positive, negative or negative health-related words. During the expression recognition task, they were asked to indicate whether emotional versions of these faces were happy or angry. The present study comprised of two experiments (N= 61; N= 52) that differed in the negative and positive words used in-order to investigate whether stronger word valence would affect expression recognition. Both experiments demonstrated that pairing with negative, positive, and negative health-related words affected the likability of the faces. Faces paired with positive words were extremely liked, faces paired with negative words were extremely disliked. However, faces paired with negative health-related words were not disliked and almost as liked as the faces paired with positive words. However, expression recognition was not affected by face-word pairings although participants had learned the pairings very well in both experiments. Findings from this study offer novel insights for person perception. The increased likability of faces paired with negative health-related words could be attributed to empathy or compassion. Future research could explore how diseases commonly regarded as stigmatised affect face likability and expression recognition.