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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Perception Science
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1458373

Unconscious Processing of Happy Faces Correlates with Prosocial Tendency but not Extraversion

Provisionally accepted
  • Beijing Union University, Beijing, Beijing Municipality, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Perceiving facial expressions plays an important crucial role in face-to-face social interactions. A wealth of studies has revealed the unconscious processing of emotional stimuli like, including facial expressions. However, little is known about the relationship between the unconscious processing of happy faces and socially oriented personality traits-, such as extraversion and prosocial tendency-remains largely unexplored. By pairing backward-masked faces with supraliminally presented faces on in both visual fields, we found that the discrimination of visible emotional faces was modulated by the facial expressions of the invisible faces on in the opposite visual field. Emotionally The emotionally consistent condition showed a shorter reaction time (Exp 1) or higher accuracy (Exp 2) than the inconsistent condition. Moreover, the unconscious processing of happy faces was positively correlated with prosocial tendency, whereas it did not correlate but not with extraversion personality. These findings shed new light on the adaptive functions of unconscious emotional face processing, and highlight the importance of future investigations toward into the unconscious processing of extrafoveal happy expression.

    Keywords: unconscious, emotional face, Happy face, prosocial tendency, Extraversion

    Received: 05 Jul 2024; Accepted: 29 Nov 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Xu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Qian Xu, Beijing Union University, Beijing, 100101, Beijing Municipality, China

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.