Is it about me? Time-course of self-relevance and valence effects on the perception of neutral faces with direct and averted gaze

Demystifying authenticity: Behavioral and neurophysiological signatures of self-positivity for authentic and presented selves

Authenticity has captivated scholars. But what is it? An emerging view considers it exaggerated favorability (self-enhancement), whereas traditional views regard it as self-accuracy and self-consistency. We tested these theoretical views by contrasting the authentic self with the presented self, a highly desirable representation. Behaviorally, participants ascribed less positivity to the authentic self: They endorsed more negative traits and were faster to admit having them; also, they endorsed fewer positive traits and were slower to admit having them. Neurally, participants manifested preferential processing of threatening information (P1), followed by preferential processing of favorable information (N170), about the presented self (than authentic self), indicating its brittleness. At a later stage (LPP), participants engaged in more elaborate processing of threatening and favorable information about the authentic self, indicating its subjective importance. Authenticity, albeit mostly positive, allows room for negativity.

Emotional Evaluations from Partners and Opponents Differentially Influence the Perception of Ambiguous Faces

The influence of contextual valence and interpersonal distance on facial expression perception remains unclear despite their significant role in shaping social perceptions. In this event-related potential (ERP) study, we investigated the temporal dynamics underlying the processing of surprised faces across different interpersonal distances (partner, opponent, or stranger) and contextual valence (positive, neutral, or negative) contexts. Thirty-five participants rated the valence of surprised faces. An advanced mass univariate statistical approach was utilized to analyze the ERP data. Behaviorally, surprised faces in partner-related negative contexts were rated more negatively than those in opponent- and stranger-related contexts. The ERP results revealed an increased P1 amplitude for surprised faces in negative relative to neutral contexts. Both the early posterior negativity (EPN) and late positive potentials (LPP) were also modulated by contextual valence, with larger amplitudes for faces in positive relative to neutral and negative contexts. Additionally, when compared to stranger-related contexts, faces in partner-related contexts exhibited enhanced P1 and EPN responses, while those in opponent-related contexts showed amplified LPP responses. Taken together, these findings elucidate the modulation of intricate social contexts on the perception and interpretation of ambiguous facial expressions, thereby enhancing our understanding of nonverbal communication and emotional cognition.

Self-reference and emotional reaction drive aesthetic judgment

Traditional philosophical inquiry, and more recently neuroscientific studies, have investigated the sources of artworks' aesthetic appeal. A substantial effort has been made to isolate the objective features contributing to aesthetic appreciation. While variables such as contrast or symmetry have been shown to robustly impact aesthetic judgment, they only account for a small portion of the intersubjective variability in aesthetic ratings. Recent multiprocess model of aesthetic appreciation could accommodate this finding by proposing that evaluative processes based on self-reference underpin the idiosyncrasy of aesthetic judgment. We tested this hypothesis in two behavioral studies, that were basically conceptual replications of our previous work, in which we took advantage of the self-reference effect on memory. We also tried to disentangle the role of self-reference and emotional reaction to artworks in guiding aesthetic judgments, by comparing an aesthetic judgment encoding condition to a self-reference condition (Study 1), and an emotional evaluation condition (Study 2). We show that artworks encoded in an aesthetic judgment condition exhibit a similar mnesic advantage compared to both the self-reference and the emotional evaluation encoding conditions. Moreover, retrospective emotional judgment correlates with both self-reference and aesthetic judgments ratings. These results suggest that a basic mechanism, appraisal of self-relevance, could ground aesthetic judgments.

Morality or competence is more important? The effect of evaluation dimensions on ERP responses to neutral faces depends on contextual valence and self-relevance

Recent studies have shown that the processing of neutral facial expressions could be modulated by the valence and self-relevance of preceding verbal evaluations. However, these studies have not distinguished the dimension (i.e., morality and competence) from verbal evaluations. In fact, there is a hot controversy about whether morality or competence receives more weight. Therefore, using the ERP technique, the current study aimed to address this issue by comparing the influence of morality and competence evaluations on behavioral and neural responses to neutral facial expressions when these evaluations varied with contextual valence and self-relevance. Our ERP results revealed that the early EPN amplitudes were larger for neutral faces after receiving evaluations about self relative to evaluations about senders. Moreover, the EPN was more negative after a competence evaluation relative to a morality evaluation when these evaluations were positive, while this effect was absent when these evaluations were negative. The late LPP was larger after a morality evaluation compared to a competence evaluation when these evaluations were negative and directed to self. However, no significant LPP effect between morality and competence evaluations was observed when these evaluations were positive. The present study extended previous studies by showing that early and late processing stages of faces are affected by the evaluation dimension in a top-down manner and further modulated by contextual valence and self-relevance.

Gender congruence and emotion effects in cross-modal associative learning: Insights from ERPs and pupillary responses

Social and emotional cues from faces and voices are highly relevant and have been reliably demonstrated to attract attention involuntarily. However, there are mixed findings as to which degree associating emotional valence to faces occurs automatically. In the present study, we tested whether inherently neutral faces gain additional relevance by being conditioned with either positive, negative, or neutral vocal affect bursts. During learning, participants performed a gender-matching task on face-voice pairs without explicit emotion judgments of the voices. In the test session on a subsequent day, only the previously associated faces were presented and had to be categorized regarding gender. We analyzed event-related potentials (ERPs), pupil diameter, and response times (RTs) of N = 32 subjects. Emotion effects were found in auditory ERPs and RTs during the learning session, suggesting that task-irrelevant emotion was automatically processed. However, ERPs time-locked to the conditioned faces were mainly modulated by the task-relevant information, that is, the gender congruence of the face and voice, but not by emotion. Importantly, these ERP and RT effects of learned congruence were not limited to learning but extended to the test session, that is, after removing the auditory stimuli. These findings indicate successful associative learning in our paradigm, but it did not extend to the task-irrelevant dimension of emotional relevance. Therefore, cross-modal associations of emotional relevance may not be completely automatic, even though the emotion was processed in the voice.

Beyond facial expressions: A systematic review on effects of emotional relevance of faces on the N170

The N170 is the most prominent electrophysiological signature of face processing. While facial expressions reliably modulate the N170, there is considerable variance in N170 modulations by other sources of emotional relevance. Therefore, we systematically review and discuss this research area using different methods to manipulate the emotional relevance of inherently neutral faces. These methods were categorized into (1) existing pre-experimental affective person knowledge (e.g., negative attitudes towards outgroup faces), (2) experimentally instructed affective person knowledge (e.g., negative person information), (3) contingency-based affective learning (e.g., fear-conditioning), or (4) the immediate affective context (e.g., emotional information directly preceding the face presentation). For all categories except the immediate affective context category, the majority of studies reported significantly increased N170 amplitudes depending on the emotional relevance of faces. Furthermore, the potentiated N170 was observed across different attention conditions, supporting the role of the emotional relevance of faces on the early prioritized processing of configural facial information, regardless of low-level differences. However, we identified several open research questions and suggest venues for further research.

Electrophysiological, emotional and behavioural responses of female targets of sexual objectification

Sexual objectification and the interiorized objectifying gaze (self-objectification) are dangerous phenomena for women's psychological wellness. However, their specific effects on women's socio-affective reactions are still poorly understood, and their neural activity has never been explored before. In the present study, we investigated women's emotional and electrophysiological responses during simulated computer-based objectifying social interactions, and we examined consequent punishing behaviours towards the perpetrator using the ultimatum game. Behavioural results (N = 36) showed that during objectifying encounters women generally felt angrier/disgusted and tended to punish the perpetrator in later interactions. However, the more the women self-objectified, the more they felt ashamed (p = 0.011) and tended to punish the perpetrators less (p = 0.008). At a neural level (N = 32), objectifying interactions modulated female participants' neural signal elicited during the processing of the perpetrator, increasing early (N170) and later (EPN, LPP) ERP components. In addition, only the amplitude of the LPP positively correlated with shame (p = 0.006) and the level of self-objectification (p = 0.018). This finding provides first evidence for the specific time-course of sexual objectification, self-objectification and its associated shame response, and proves that emotional and social consequences of sexual objectification in women may depend on their tendency to self-objectify.

Association between attachment anxiety and the gaze direction-related N170

Attachment theory suggests that interindividual differences in attachment security versus insecurity (anxiety and avoidance) contribute to the ways in which people perceive social emotional signals, particularly from the human face. Among different facial features, eye gaze conveys crucial information for social interaction, with a straight gaze triggering different cognitive and emotional processes as compared to an averted gaze. It remains unknown, however, how interindividual differences in attachment associate with early face encoding in the context of a straight versus averted gaze. Using electroencephalography (EEG) and recording event-related potentials (ERPs), specifically the N170 component, the present study (N = 50 healthy adults) measured how the characteristics of attachment anxiety and avoidance relate to the encoding of faces with respect to gaze direction and head orientation. Our findings reveal a significant relationship between gaze direction (irrespective of head orientation) and attachment anxiety on the interhemispheric (i.e. right) asymmetry of the N170 and thus provide evidence for an association between attachment anxiety and eye gaze processing during early visual face encoding.

Embodying cognitive ethology

Cognitive psychology considers the environment as providing information, not affecting fundamental information processes. Thus, cognitive psychology's traditional paradigms study responses to precisely timed stimuli in controlled environments. However, new research demonstrates the environment does influence cognitive processes and offers cognitive psychology new methods. The authors examine one such proposal: cognitive ethology. Cognitive ethology improves cognitive psychology's ecological validity through first drawing inspiration from robust phenomena in the real world, then moving into the lab to test those phenomena. To support such methods, cognitive ethologists appeal to embodied cognition, or 4E cognition, for its rich relationships between agents and environments. However, the authors note while cognitive ethology focuses on new methods (epistemology) inspired by embodied cognition, it preserves most traditional assumptions about cognitive processes (ontology). But embodied cognition-particularly its radical variants-also provides strong ontological challenges to cognitive psychology, which work against cognitive ethology. The authors argue cognitive ethology should align with the ontology of less radical embodied cognition, which produces epistemological implications, offering alternative methodologies. For example, cognitive ethology can explore differences between real-world and lab studies to fully understand how cognition depends on environments.

Self-reference processing of fat-face and sick-face in individuals with different disgust sensitivity: Evidence from behavioral and neuroelectrophysiology

Self-reference effect has been widely discussed. Previous scholars believed that self-related information can be processed faster is due to the positive attribute of self-concept which speeds up self-related information processing. When self-related information is given negative attributes, the self-reference effect will be weakened. In this study, fat and sick, two kinds of stimuli associated with disgust characteristics, were added to self- and other-faces. We found that disease stimuli, which are closely related to survival threats, eliminated the self-reference effect while the obesity stimuli only weakened the self-reference effect to a certain extent. Event-related potential (ERP) analysis demonstrated that sick-faces have a greater amplitude than standard-faces in the EPN and LPP components. We believe that this may be due to the urgency of the disease threat, which leads to the selective attention to the disease threat in the early perception stage and the allocation of more attention resources for rapid response in the later stage. In addition, we found that disgust sensitivity specifically maintains individuals' self-referential effects by dissociating individuals from others in disease contexts. These results further support the behavioral immune function of disgust as a gatekeeper of the self in potentially contaminated environments. In conclusion, our study showed that in the face of survival threat, the self-reference effect is eliminated, and disgust tried to slow down this elimination effect to protect self. This study extends the behavioral immunity theory to some extent and further deepens the understanding of the relationship between disgust and self.

Influence of affective verbal context on emotional facial expression perception of social anxiety

Previous studies have shown that the perception of ambiguous facial expressions for individuals with social anxiety was influenced by the affective verbal context. However, it is still unknown how emotional facial expressions are perceived by individuals with social anxiety in the context of the verbal context. In this study, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) technology to examine how individuals with social anxiety perceive emotional facial expressions in positive and negative contexts. The results showed that: (1) Within the negative verbal contexts, the amplitude of P1 induced by facial expressions in the social anxiety group was significantly higher than that induced by the healthy control group; The N170 amplitude induced by facial expressions in social anxiety group was less negative than that in the healthy control group, and was not affected by the context. (2) The social anxiety group had significantly higher LPP in negative contexts elicited by angry expressions than by happy expressions. This study proved that the perception of emotional facial expressions was influenced by top-down information in the early and late stages of visual perception for individuals with social anxiety.

Long-Term Influence of Incidental Emotions on the Emotional Judgment of Neutral Faces

Background: Evidence indicates that the processing of facial stimuli may be influenced by incidental factors, and these influences are particularly powerful when facial expressions are ambiguous, such as neutral faces. However, limited research investigated whether emotional contextual information presented in a preceding and unrelated experiment could be pervasively carried over to another experiment to modulate neutral face processing.

Objective: The present study aims to investigate whether an emotional text presented in a first experiment could generate negative emotion toward neutral faces in a second experiment unrelated to the previous experiment.

Methods: Ninety-nine students (all women) were randomly assigned to read and evaluate a negative text (negative context) or a neutral text (neutral text) in the first experiment. In the subsequent second experiment, the participants performed the following two tasks: (1) an attentional task in which neutral faces were presented as distractors and (2) a task involving the emotional judgment of neutral faces.

Results: The results show that compared to the neutral context, in the negative context, the participants rated more faces as negative. No significant result was found in the attentional task.

Conclusion: Our study demonstrates that incidental emotional information available in a previous experiment can increase participants’ propensity to interpret neutral faces as more negative when emotional information is directly evaluated. Therefore, the present study adds important evidence to the literature suggesting that our behavior and actions are modulated by previous information in an incidental or low perceived way similar to what occurs in everyday life, thereby modulating our judgments and emotions.

I can see it in your eyes: Perceived gaze direction impacts ERP and behavioural measures of affective theory of mind

Looking at someone's eyes is thought to be important for affective theory of mind (aTOM), our ability to infer their emotional state. However, it is unknown whether an individual's gaze direction influences our aTOM judgements and what the time course of this influence might be. We presented participants with sentences describing individuals in positive, negative or neutral scenarios, followed by direct or averted gaze neutral face pictures of those individuals. Participants made aTOM judgements about each person's mental state, including their affective valence and arousal, and we investigated whether the face gaze direction impacted those judgements. Participants rated that gazers were feeling more positive when they displayed direct gaze as opposed to averted gaze, and that they were feeling more aroused during negative contexts when gaze was averted as opposed to direct. Event-related potentials associated with face perception and affective processing were examined using mass-univariate analyses to track the time-course of this eye-gaze and affective processing interaction at a neural level. Both positive and negative trials were differentiated from neutral trials at many stages of processing. This included the early N200 and EPN components, believed to reflect automatic emotion areas activation and attentional selection respectively. This also included the later P300 and LPP components, thought to reflect elaborative cognitive appraisal of emotional content. Critically, sentence valence and gaze direction interacted over these later components, which may reflect the incorporation of eye-gaze in the cognitive evaluation of another's emotional state. The results suggest that gaze perception directly impacts aTOM processes, and that altered eye-gaze processing in clinical populations may contribute to associated aTOM impairments.

Charged With a Crime: The Neuronal Signature of Processing Negatively Evaluated Faces Under Different Attentional Conditions

Our brains rapidly respond to human faces and can differentiate between many identities, retrieving rich semantic emotional-knowledge information. Studies provide a mixed picture of how such information affects event-related potentials (ERPs). We systematically examined the effect of feature-based attention on ERP modulations to briefly presented faces of individuals associated with a crime. The tasks required participants ( N = 40 adults) to discriminate the orientation of lines overlaid onto the face, the age of the face, or emotional information associated with the face. Negative faces amplified the N170 ERP component during all tasks, whereas the early posterior negativity (EPN) and late positive potential (LPP) components were increased only when the emotional information was attended to. These findings suggest that during early configural analyses (N170), evaluative information potentiates face processing regardless of feature-based attention. During intermediate, only partially resource-dependent, processing stages (EPN) and late stages of elaborate stimulus processing (LPP), attention to the acquired emotional information is necessary for amplified processing of negatively evaluated faces.

Feeling through another's eyes: Perceived gaze direction impacts ERP and behavioural measures of positive and negative affective empathy

Looking at the eyes informs us about the thoughts and emotions of those around us, and impacts our own emotional state. However, it is unknown how perceiving direct and averted gaze impacts our ability to share the gazer's positive and negative emotions, abilities referred to as positive and negative affective empathy. We presented 44 participants with contextual sentences describing positive, negative and neutral events happening to other people (e.g. "Her newborn was saved/killed/fed yesterday afternoon."). These were designed to elicit positive, negative, or little to no empathy, and were followed by direct or averted gaze images of the individuals described. Participants rated their affective empathy for the individual and their own emotional valence on each trial. Event-related potentials time-locked to face-onset and associated with empathy and emotional processing were recorded to investigate whether they were modulated by gaze direction. Relative to averted gaze, direct gaze was associated with increased positive valence in the positive and neutral conditions and with increased positive empathy ratings. A similar pattern was found at the neural level, using robust mass-univariate statistics. The N100, thought to reflect an automatic activation of emotion areas, was modulated by gaze in the affective empathy conditions, with opposite effect directions in positive and negative conditions.. The P200, an ERP component sensitive to positive stimuli, was modulated by gaze direction only in the positive empathy condition. Positive and negative trials were processed similarly at the early N200 processing stage, but later diverged, with only negative trials modulating the EPN, P300 and LPP components. These results suggest that positive and negative affective empathy are associated with distinct time-courses, and that perceived gaze direction uniquely modulates positive empathy, highlighting the importance of studying empathy with face stimuli.

Meaningful faces: Self-relevance of semantic context in an initial social encounter improves later face recognition

Self-relevant stimuli (i.e. meaningful/important to the observer and related to the self) are typically remembered better than other-relevant stimuli. However, whether a self-relevance memory benefit could be conferred to a novel neutral face, remains to be seen. Recent studies have shown that emotional responses to neutral faces can be altered by using a preceding sentence as context that varies in terms of self-relevance (self/other-relevant) and valence (positive/negative; e.g. "S/he thinks your comment is dumb/smart"). We adapted this paradigm to investigate whether the context conferred by the preceding sentence also impacts memorability of the subsequently presented face. Participants saw faces primed with contextual sentences and rated how aroused, and how positive or negative, the faces made them feel. Later incidental recognition accuracy for the faces was greater when these had been preceded by self-relevant compared to other-relevant sentences. Faces preceded by self-relevant contexts were also rated as more arousing. There was no impact of sentence valence on arousal ratings or on recognition memory for faces. Sentence self-relevance and valence interacted to affect participants' ratings of how positive or negative the faces made them feel during encoding, but did not interact to impact later recognition. Our results indicate that initial social encounters can have a lasting effect on one's memory of another person, producing an enhanced memory trace of that individual. We propose that the effect is driven by an arousal-based mechanism, elicited by faces perceived to be self-relevant.

Are you as important as me? Self-other discrimination within trait-adjective processing

Healthy adults typically display enhanced processing for self- (relative to other-) relevant and positive (relative to negative) information. However, it is unclear whether these two biases interact to form a self-positivity bias, whereby self-positive information receives prioritized processing. It is also unclear how a blocked versus mixed referent design impacts reference and valence processing. We addressed these questions using behavioral and electrophysiological indices across two studies using a Self-Referential Encoding Task, followed by surprise recall and recognition tasks. Early (P1) and late (LPP) event-related potentials were time-locked to a series of trait adjectives, encoded relative to oneself or a fictional character, with referent presented in a blocked (Exp. 1) or mixed (Exp. 2) trial design. Regardless of study design, participants recalled and recognized more self- than other-relevant adjectives, and recognized more positive than negative adjectives. Additionally, participants demonstrated larger LPP amplitudes for self-relevant and positive adjectives. The LPP self-relevance effect emerged earlier and persisted longer in the blocked (400-800 ms) versus mixed design (600-800 ms). The LPP valence effect was not apparent in the blocked design, but appeared late in the mixed design (600-1200 ms). Critically, the interaction between self-relevance and valence appeared only behaviorally in the mixed design, suggesting that overall self-relevance and valence independently impact neural socio-cognitive processing.

From eye to face: The impact of face outline, feature number, and feature saliency on the early neural response to faces

The LIFTED model of early face perception postulates that the face-sensitive N170 event-related potential may reflect underlying neural inhibition mechanisms which serve to regulate holistic and featural processing. It remains unclear, however, what specific factors impact these neural inhibition processes. Here, N170 peak responses were recorded whilst adults maintained fixation on a single eye using a gaze-contingent paradigm, and the presence/absence of a face outline, as well as the number and type of parafoveal features within the outline, were manipulated. N170 amplitudes and latencies were reduced when a single eye was fixated within a face outline compared to fixation on the same eye in isolation, demonstrating that the simple presence of a face outline is sufficient to elicit a shift towards a more face-like neural response. A monotonic decrease in the N170 amplitude and latency was observed with increasing numbers of parafoveal features, and the type of feature(s) present in parafovea further modulated this early face response. These results support the idea of neural inhibition exerted by parafoveal features onto the foveated feature as a function of the number, and possibly the nature, of parafoveal features. Specifically, the results suggest the use of a feature saliency framework (eyes > mouth > nose) at the neural level, such that the parafoveal eye may play a role in down-regulating the response to the other eye (in fovea) more so than the nose or the mouth. These results confirm the importance of parafoveal features and the face outline in the neural inhibition mechanism, and provide further support for a feature saliency mechanism guiding early face perception.

The effect of emotional and self-referential contexts on ERP responses towards surprised faces

The perception of surprised faces is demonstrably modulated by emotional context. However, the influence of self-relevance and its interaction with emotional context have not been explored. The present study investigated the effects of contextual valence and self-reference on the perception of surprised faces. Our results revealed that faces in a negative context elicited a larger N170 than those in a neutral context. The EPN was affected by the interaction between contextual valence and self-reference, with larger amplitudes for faces in self-related positive contexts and sender-related negative contexts. Additionally, LPP amplitudes were enhanced for faces in negative contexts relative to neutral and positive contexts, as well as for self-related contexts in comparison to sender-related contexts. Together, these findings help to elucidate the psychophysiological mechanisms underlying the effects of emotional and self-referential contexts on the perception of surprised faces, which are characterized by distinctive ERPs.

Perceived Gaze Direction Differentially Affects Discrimination of Facial Emotion, Attention, and Gender - An ERP Study

The perception of eye-gaze is thought to be a key component of our everyday social interactions. While the neural correlates of direct and averted gaze processing have been investigated, there is little consensus about how these gaze directions may be processed differently as a function of the task being performed. In a within-subject design, we examined how perception of direct and averted gaze affected performance on tasks requiring participants to use directly available facial cues to infer the individuals' emotional state (emotion discrimination), direction of attention (attention discrimination) and gender (gender discrimination). Neural activity was recorded throughout the three tasks using EEG, and ERPs time-locked to face onset were analyzed. Participants were most accurate at discriminating emotions with direct gaze faces, but most accurate at discriminating attention with averted gaze faces, while gender discrimination was not affected by gaze direction. At the neural level, direct and averted gaze elicited different patterns of activation depending on the task over frontal sites, from approximately 220-290 ms. More positive amplitudes were seen for direct than averted gaze in the emotion discrimination task. In contrast, more positive amplitudes were seen for averted gaze than for direct gaze in the gender discrimination task. These findings are among the first direct evidence that perceived gaze direction modulates neural activity differently depending on task demands, and that at the behavioral level, specific gaze directions functionally overlap with emotion and attention discrimination, precursors to more elaborated theory of mind processes.

Threat-conditioned contexts modulate the late positive potential to faces-A mobile EEG/virtual reality study

In everyday life, the motivational value of faces is bound to the contexts in which faces are perceived. Electrophysiological studies have demonstrated that inherent negatively valent contexts modulate cortical face processing as assessed with ERP components. However, it is not well understood whether learned (rather than inherent) and three-dimensional aversive contexts similarly modulate the neural processing of faces. Using full immersive virtual reality (VR) and mobile EEG techniques, 25 participants underwent a differential fear conditioning paradigm, in which one virtual room was paired with an aversive noise burst (threat context) and another with a nonaversive noise burst (safe context). Subsequently, avatars with neutral or angry facial expressions were presented in the threat and safe contexts while EEG was recorded. Analysis of the late positive potential (LPP), which presumably indicates motivational salience, revealed a significant interaction of context (threat vs. safe) and face type (neutral vs. angry). Neutral faces evoked increased LPP amplitudes in threat versus safe contexts, while angry faces evoked increased early LPP amplitudes regardless of context. In addition to indicating that threat-conditioned contexts alter the processing of ambiguous faces, the present study demonstrates the successful integration of EEG and VR with particular relevance for affective neuroscience research.

Social inclusion, but not exclusion, delays attentional disengagement from direct gaze

The present study investigated whether another person’s direct gaze holds a perceiver’s visuospatial attention and whether social exclusion or social inclusion would enhance this effect. Participants were socially excluded, socially included, or underwent a non-social control manipulation in a virtual ball-tossing game. The manipulation was followed by an attentional disengagement task, in which we measured manual response times in identification of peripheral stimuli shown to the left or right of centrally presented faces portraying direct or downward gaze. Contrary to our hypotheses, the response times were not, in general, longer for direct gaze trials than downward gaze trials, and exclusion did not increase the delay in direct gaze trials. Instead, we discovered that, in the social inclusion group, the response times were longer for direct gaze trials relative to downward gaze trials. Thus, social inclusion might have activated affiliation-related cognitive processes leading to delayed attentional disengagement from faces cueing affiliation.