Your brain turns faces behind you into stronger emotions, rewriting how we read social cues

A research team from the Cognitive Neurotechnology Unit and the Visual Perception and Cognition Laboratory at Toyohashi University of Technology investigated how facial expressions are perceived when a face is located behind an observer. Participants wearing a head-mounted display observed 3D face models presented either in front of or behind them in a virtual reality (VR) environment and made binary judgments about the facial expression. The stimuli varied continuously from neutral to angry, and participants judged whether each face appeared neutral or angry.