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 gaze on emotion recognition. Within face perception work, the social functional approach was developed to explain how combined processing of social cues (e.g., emotion, eye gaze, race, gender/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 perception. In this chapter, we review past work examining emotion perception at the intersection of race and gender/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 Intersectionality.