The Perception of Emotion and Social Cues in Faces

Research on the neural basis for the perception of emotion and social cues in faces is growing rapidly and involves the efforts of investigators in numerous laboratories around the world. This special issue of Neuropsychologia offers a sampling of this research and provides a starting point for interested students to pursue further study of the work by the groups that are represented in this issue. This work also illustrates the central role that research on face perception plays in the new field of social neuroscience. Beginning with the seminal work by Perrett and colleagues on the social information that is evident in the tuning functions of single face-responsive neurons in the macaque (Perrett et al., 1990) and a prescient essay by Brothers (1990), the study of face perception has been a source of inspiration for social neuroscience.