No influence of eye gaze on emotional face processing in the absence of conscious awareness

Abstract

The human brain has evolved specialised mechanisms to enable the rapid detection of threat cues, including emotional face expressions (e.g., fear and anger). However, contextual cues – such as gaze direction – influence the ability to recognise emotional expressions. For instance, anger paired with direct gaze, and fear paired with averted gaze are more accurately recognised compared to alternate conjunctions of these features. It is argued that this is because gaze direction conveys the relevance and locus of the threat to the observer. Here, we used continuous flash suppression (CFS) to assess whether the modulatory effect of gaze direction on emotional face processing occurs outside of conscious awareness. Previous research using CFS has demonstrated that fearful facial expressions are prioritised by the visual system and gain privileged access to awareness over other expressed emotions. We hypothesised that if the modulatory effects of gaze on emotional face processing occur also at this level, then the gaze-emotion conjunctions signalling self-relevant threat will reach awareness faster than those that do not. We report that fearful faces gain privileged access to awareness over angry faces, but that gaze direction does not modulate this effect. Thus, our findings suggest that previously reported effects of gaze direction on emotional face processing are likely to occur once the face is detected, where the self-relevance and locus of the threat can be consciously appraised.

What’s in a gaze, what’s in a face?: The direct gaze effect can be modulated by emotion expression.

“…Angry faces with direct gaze have repeatedly been found to most intensively signal threat directed at the observer. In contrast, fearful faces with averted gaze are assumed to indicate an external source of threat in the immediate environment of the observer (e.g., Adams & Kleck, 2005; Caruana et al, 2019; Sander et al, 2007). Although we found an enhanced direct gaze effect for angry emotion expressions, there was no response time benefit for fearful faces showing averted gaze—in fact, there was no difference between averted and direct gaze in fearful faces.…”

Gradual relation between perceptual awareness, recognition and pupillary responses to social threat

“…Gaze effects are the strongest for weak, and therefore more ambiguous, facial expressions (Cristinzio, N’diaye, Seeck, Vuilleumier, & Sander, 2010; N’diaye, Sander, & Vuilleumier, 2009) in comparison to faces expressing emotion in a more intense and clear manner (El Zein, Gamond, Conty, & Grèzes, 2015; Graham & LaBar, 2012). Interestingly, gaze direction only modulated this effect once threatening faces were consciously perceived but not outside awareness (Caruana, Inkley, Zein, & Seymour, 2019).…”

Objects that induce face pareidolia are prioritized by the visual system

“…This might manifest as a larger stimulus effect in patients with schizophrenia than controls (i.e., relatively faster suppression times for face pareidolia stimuli compared to non‐face stimuli). Because b‐CFS probes early stages of perception and does not require participants to report the features of the stimulus, the use of this method specifically eliminates potential influences of cognitive bias on the participant's report (Caruana et al, 2019; Caruana & Seymour, 2021; Caruana et al, 2019; Seymour et al, 2016).…”