Visual stimuli with social-emotional relevance have been claimed to gain preferential access to awareness. For example, recent studies used the breaking continuous flash suppression paradigm (b-CFS) to show that faces that are perceived as less dominant and more trustworthy are prioritized in awareness. Here we asked whether these effects truly reflect differences in social-emotional meaning or whether they can be equally explained by differences in low-level stimulus properties. In Experiment 1, we successfully replicated dominance-and untrustworthiness-related slowing for upright faces. However, these effects were equally strong for inverted faces, even though it was more difficult to perceive social characteristics in inverted faces. The previously reported correlation between dominance-and untrustworthiness-related slowing in b-CFS and self-reported propensity to trust did not replicate. Experiment 2 showed that dominance-related slowing in b-CFS can also be observed when only presenting the eye region of faces, and even when the eye region was presented inverted and/or with reversed contrast polarity, in which case personality traits were no longer discernible. These results were replicated in Experiment 3 following a pre-registration protocol. Altogether, our findings link dominance-related slowing in b-CFS to physical differences in the eye region that are-when presented in isolation-unrelated to the perception of dominance. We conclude that low-level physical stimulus differences provide a parsimonious explanation for the effect of social facial characteristics on access to awareness.

Perception is context dependent. For example, the perceived orientation of a bar changes depending on the presence of oriented bars around it. Contextual effects have also been demonstrated for more complex judgements, such as facial attractiveness or expression, although it remains unclear how these contextual facial effects depend on the types of faces surrounding the target face. To examine this, we measured the perceived age (a quantifiable measure) of a target face in the presence of differently aged faces in the surround. Using a unique database of standardized passport photos, participants were asked to estimate the age of a target face which was viewed either on its own or surrounded by two different identity flanker faces. The flanker faces were either both younger or both older than the target face, with different age offsets between flankers and targets of ±5, ±10, ±15, ±20 years. We find that when a target face is surrounded by younger faces, it systematically appears younger than when viewed on its own, and when it is surrounded by older faces, it systematically appears older than when viewed on its own. Surprisingly, we find that the magnitude of the flanker effects on perceived age of the target is asymmetric with younger flankers having a greater influence than older flankers, a result that may reflect the participants' own-age bias, since all participants were young. This result holds irrespective of gender or race of the faces and is consistent with averaging.

Early adversity and trauma can have profound effects on children’s affective development and mental health outcomes. Interventions that improve mental health and socioemotional development are essential to mitigate these effects. We conducted a pilot study examining whether a reading-based program (We Love Reading) improves emotion recognition and mental health through socialization in Syrian refugee (n = 49) and Jordanian non-refugee children (n = 45) aged 7–12 years old (M = 8.9, 57% girls) living in Jordan. To measure emotion recognition, children classified the expression in faces morphed between two emotions (happy–sad and fear–anger), while mental health was assessed using survey measures of optimism, depression, anxiety, distress, and insecurity. Prior to the intervention, both groups of children were significantly biased to interpret ambiguous facial expressions as sad, while there was no clear bias on the fear–anger spectrum. Following the intervention, we found changes in Syrian refugee children’s bias in emotion recognition away from sad facial expressions, although this returned to pre-intervention levels 2 months after the end of the program. This shift in the bias away from sad facial expressions was not associated with changes in self-reported mental health symptoms. These results suggest a potential positive role of the reading intervention on affective development, but further research is required to determine the longer-term impacts of the program.

The perception of another’s gaze direction and facial expression complements verbal communication and modulates how we interact with other people. However, our perception of these two cues is not always accurate, even when we are looking directly at the person. In addition, in many cases social communication occurs within groups of people where we can’t always look directly at every person in the group. Here, we sought to examine how the presence of other people influences our perception of a target face. We asked participants to judge the direction of gaze of the target face as either looking to their left, to their right or directly at them, when the face was viewed on its own or viewed within a group of other identity faces. The target face either had an angry or a neutral expression and was viewed directly (foveal experiment), or within peripheral vision (peripheral experiment). When the target was viewed within a group, the flanking faces also had either neutral or angry expressions and their gaze was in one of five different directions (from averted leftwards to averted rightwards in steps of 10°). When the target face was viewed foveally there was no effect of target emotion on participants’ judgments of its gaze direction. There was also no effect of the presence of flankers (regardless of expression) on the perception of the target gaze. When the target face was viewed peripherally, participants judged its direction of gaze to be direct over a wider range of gaze deviations than when viewed foveally, and more so for angry faces than neutral faces. We also find that flankers (regardless of emotional expression) did not influence performance. This suggests that observers judge that angry faces were looking at them over a broad range of gaze deviations in the periphery only, possibly resulting from increased uncertainty about the stimulus.

When looking at groups of people, we can extract information from the different faces to derive properties of the group, such as its average facial emotion, although how this average is computed remains a matter of debate. Here, we examined whether our participants’ personal familiarity with the faces in the group, as well as the intensity of the facial expressions, biased ensemble perception. Participants judged the average emotional expression of ensembles of four different identities whose expressions depicted either neutral, angry, or happy emotions. For the angry and happy expressions, the intensity of the emotion could be either low (e.g., slightly happy) or high (very happy). When all the identities in the ensemble were unfamiliar, the presence of any high intensity emotional face biased ensemble perception towards its emotion. However, when a familiar face was present in the ensemble, perception was biased towards the familiar face’s emotion regardless of its intensity. These findings reveal that how we perceive the average emotion of a group is influenced by both the emotional intensity and familiarity of the faces comprising the group, supporting the idea that different faces may be weighted differently in ensemble perception. These findings have important implications for the judgements we make about a group’s overall emotional state may be biased by individuals within the group.