Facing a Perceptual Crossroads: Mixed Messages and Shared Meanings in Social Visual Perception

The human body conveys social information through a myriad of cues, one of the most important being emotion. Perception of emotion in faces has been extensively researched, with a particular focus on the impact of eye gazeEye gaze on emotion recognition. Within face perceptionFace perception work, the social functional approach was developed to explain how combined processing of social cues (e.g., emotion, eye gazeEye gaze, raceRace, gender/sexGender/sex) is highly adaptive and necessary to facilitate social interaction. Recently, computer models and machine learning have been incorporated into person perception research to gain a clearer understanding of how physiognomic cues interact with emotion information to inform emotion perceptionEmotion perception. In this chapter, we review past work examining emotion perceptionEmotion perception at the intersection of raceRace and gender/sexGender/sex and highlight important findings from human perceivers and computer models. We also address important ethical considerations involved in using new technology to conduct social perception research and emphasize the critical role of IntersectionalityIntersectionality.