Eye gaze direction modulates nonconscious affective contextual effect

Abstract

Facial emotion recognition is inherently contextualized and may automatically incorporate affective information from the context. Here we investigate whether this affective contextual effect is modulated by a prominent social cue, namely, the gaze direction of the contextualized emotional face. We demonstrate that the perceived emotional expression of a visible target face is biased toward the emotion of an invisible contextual face, with this nonconscious affective contextual modulation dependent on the gaze direction of the target face. In particular, a target face gazing toward a contextual face induced a larger affective contextual effect than a face gazing away. Furthermore, this gaze modulation effect specifically occurred for invisible fearful contexts and hinged on individual trait anxiety levels. These findings show that social information delivered by gaze cues can modulate the fear-specific affective contextual effect without awareness, shedding new light on how compound socio-affective signals are automatically integrated into our perception of others’ emotions.