During social interactions, people's eyes convey a wealth of information about their direction of attention and their emotional and mental states. This review aims to provide a comprehensive overview of past and current research into the perception of gaze behavior and its effect on the observer. This encompasses the perception of gaze direction and its influence on perception of the other person, as well as gaze-following behavior such as joint attention, in infant, adult, and clinical populations. Particular focus is given to the gaze-cueing paradigm that has been used to investigate the mechanisms of joint attention. The contribution of this paradigm has been significant and will likely continue to advance knowledge across diverse fields within psychology and neuroscience.

Our central goal is to provide a definition of boredom in terms of the underlying mental processes that occur during an instance of boredom. Through the synthesis of psychodynamic, existential, arousal, and cognitive theories of boredom, we argue that boredom is universally conceptualized as "the aversive experience of wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity." We propose to map this conceptualization onto underlying mental processes. Specifically, we propose that boredom be defined in terms of attention. That is, boredom is the aversive state that occurs when we (a) are not able to successfully engage attention with internal (e.g., thoughts or feelings) or external (e.g., environmental stimuli) information required for participating in satisfying activity, (b) are focused on the fact that we are not able to engage attention and participate in satisfying activity, and (c) attribute the cause of our aversive state to the environment. We believe that our definition of boredom fully accounts for the phenomenal experience of boredom, brings existing theories of boredom into dialogue with one another, and suggests specific directions for future research on boredom and attention.

The goal of this review is to critically examine contradictory findings in the study of visual search for emotionally expressive faces. Several key issues are addressed: Can emotional faces be processed preattentively and guide attention? What properties of these faces influence search efficiency? Is search moderated by the emotional state of the observer? The authors argue that the evidence is consistent with claims that (a) preattentive search processes are sensitive to and influenced by facial expressions of emotion, (b) attention guidance is influenced by a dynamic interplay of emotional and perceptual factors, and (c) visual search for emotional faces is influenced by the emotional state of the observer to some extent. The authors also argue that the way in which contextual factors interact to determine search performance needs to be explored further to draw sound conclusions about the precise influence of emotional expressions on search efficiency. Methodological considerations (e.g., set size, distractor background, task set) and ecological limitations of the visual search task are discussed. Finally, specific recommendations are made for future research directions.