Search advantages for facing social groups reflect optimal interactive group sizes.

Humans are sensitive to the presence of other people as well as their interactions. For example, two individuals are found faster when they face toward (vs. away from) each other.

Gaze communicates both cue direction and agent mental states.

Introduction: Although it is well established that humans spontaneously attend to where others are looking, it remains debated whether this gaze following behavior occurs because gaze communicates directional information (i.e., an agent is looking) or because gaze communicates an agent's inferred mental content (i.

Intentional looks facilitate faster responding in observers.

Humans construct rich representations of other people's mental states. Here we investigated how intentionality in eye gaze affected perception and responses to gaze. Observers viewed videos of human gazers looking left or right.

Beyond the Whole: Reduced Empathy for Masked Emotional Faces Is Not Driven by Disrupted Configural Face Processing.

Sharing of emotional states is reduced for individuals wearing face coverings, but the mechanism behind this reduction remains unknown. Here, we investigated if face occlusion by masks reduces empathy by disrupting configural processing of emotional faces. Participants rated their empathy for happy and neutral faces which were presented in upright or inverted orientation and wore opaque, clear, or no face masks.

Lower empathy for face mask wearers is not explained by observer's reduced facial mimicry.

Facial occlusion alters social processes that rely on face visibility, including spontaneous mimicry of emotions. Given that facial mimicry of emotions is theorized to play an important role in how we empathize or share emotions with others, here we investigated if empathy was reduced for faces wearing masks because masks may reduce the ability to mimic facial expressions. In two preregistered experiments, participants rated their empathy for faces displaying happy or neutral emotions and wearing masks or no masks.