The present study adopted the breaking continuous flash suppression paradigm (b-CFS) to investigate how Chinese participants process trustworthiness (Experiment 1) and dominance (Experiment 2) at the preconscious level. In addition, we tested whether the gender of a face and the gender of a participant can influence the preconscious processing of facial trustworthiness and dominance. Experiment 1 showed that the least and most trustworthy faces both took significantly less time to break into awareness than neutral faces. In Experiment 2, for female faces, neutral faces took significantly less time to break into awareness than the least and most dominant faces. In both experiments, female faces broke through suppression faster than male faces. In summary, for Chinese participants, the preconscious processing of trustworthiness was not different between male and female faces. However, the preconscious processing of dominance was different between male and female faces.

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The purpose of this study was to investigate the neural activity evoked by facial attractiveness in conscious and subliminal conditions. The 41 participants judged facial attractiveness in a conscious condition and a subliminal condition (backward masking paradigm). The event-related potential (ERP) analysis indicated that in the conscious condition, more attractive faces elicited a longer N1 (80–120 ms) latency than less attractive faces. Moreover, more attractive female faces elicited a larger late positive component (LPC) (350–550 ms) amplitude than less attractive female faces. In the subliminal condition, more attractive faces elicited a longer P1 (140–180 ms) latency than less attractive faces. The present study demonstrated that more attractive faces evoked different early-stage ERPs from that evoked by less attractive faces in both conscious and subliminal conditions. However, the processing of facial attractiveness is obviously weakened in the subliminal condition.