The role of gaze in the processing of emotional facial expressions

Gaze plays a fundamental role in the processing of facial expressions from birth. Gaze direction is a crucial part of the social signal encoded in and decoded from faces. The ability to discriminate gaze direction, already evident early in life, is essential for the development of more complex socially relevant tasks, such as joint and shared attention. At the same time, facial expressions play a fundamental role in the encoding of gaze direction and, when combined, expression and gaze communicate behavioural motivation to approach or avoid. However, the investigation of how gaze direction and emotional expression interact during the processing of a face has been relatively neglected, and is the key question of this review