Glimpses into the social mind: Decoding messages from faces and eyes.

The human brain is fundamentally a social brain, with its perceptual and cognitive systems evolved to support a diverse set of processes aimed at enabling our complex social function. And while in the last decades the field has advanced considerably in understanding the mechanisms by which the perceptual and cognitive faculties support human social behaviour, there remains a lack of knowledge about how social information is communicated between individuals. In my work, I have studied nonverbal visual social signalling via faces and eyes. In this article, I summarize the results from three lines of my research which show that (a) limiting face visibility decreases its social value, (b) eyes transmit key social messages, and (c) group size modulates social messages. Together, these data show that visual signals from faces and eyes convey complex social messages and represent an important vehicle for the communication of social information. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).