We investigated, in young healthy subjects, how the affective content of subliminally presented priming images and their specific visual attributes impacted conscious perception of facial expressions. The priming images were broadly categorised as aggressive, pleasant, or neutral and further subcategorised by the presence of a face and by the centricity (egocentric or allocentric vantage-point) of the image content. Subjects responded to the emotion portrayed in a pixelated target-face by indicating via key-press if the expression was angry or neutral. Priming images containing a face compared to those not containing a face significantly impaired performance on neutral or angry targetface evaluation. Recognition of angry target-face expressions was selectively impaired by pleasant prime images which contained a face. For egocentric primes, recognition of neutral target-face expressions was significantly better than of angry expressions. Our results suggest that, first, the affective primacy hypothesis which predicts that affective information can be accessed automatically, preceding conscious cognition, holds true in subliminal priming only when the priming image contains a face. Second, egocentric primes interfere with the perception of angry target-face expressions suggesting that this vantage-point, directly relevant to the viewer, perhaps engages processes involved in action preparation which may weaken the priority of affect processing.Keywords: subliminal priming, image priming, affective, face expression, centricity IntroductionFaces are a rich source of visual information. Within a fraction of a second, humans can recognise emotion, sex, relative age, race, and identity, just by viewing a face. In 1872, Charles Darwin proposed that facial expressions are evolved behaviours that have a biologically adaptive function. Nearly one hundred years later, Paul Ekman (1970) defined six universal facial expressions that are recognised and expressed crossculturally-happy, sad, fear, disgust, surprise, and anger. Facial expressions are peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission.The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not . http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/255489 doi: bioRxiv preprint first posted online Jan. 30, 2018; 3 indicators of underlying emotional states, and recognition of the emotion in facial expressions is critical to interpersonal communication, response to imminent threat, and social behaviour. There is substantial evidence that the emotion of facial expressions can even be processed in absence of conscious awareness (see Tamietto and de Gelder (2010) for a review). Functional neuroimaging studies have indicated that non-consciously perceived emotional facial expressions activate subcortical structures (Whalen et al.,1998). De Gelder, Vroomen, Pourois, and Weiskrantz (1999) reported on a blindsight patient who could discriminate among facial expressions presented in his blind field.While most studies indicate that the affect of emotiona...