The tell-tale body: investigating the intertwined relationship between social cognition and visual perception through physiological indices.

This thesis explores the deep connection between social cognition and visual perception, focusing on how bodily cues reveal this relationship. We aim to highlight the physiological foundations of the visual and cognitive aspects of social perception, postulating a reciprocal interaction between early perceptual processes and social predispositions. Through three studies, we investigated the special status of social stimuli in perception and the link between physiological reactivity to emotional cues and social abilities. Using a breaking continuous flash suppression (b-CFS) paradigm, we manipulated visual awareness of emotional stimuli and measured breakthrough times to distinguish between conscious and subconscious processing. We tested three types of stimuli: emotional faces, emotional bodies, and threatening animals, while recording autonomic responses - skin conductance, pupil dilation, and facial EMG - both before and after conscious awareness. Social skills were assessed through self-report questionnaires. Our findings revealed distinct physiological activation patterns across stimuli. Emotional faces elicited the strongest effects, modulating all three autonomic indices both before and after conscious awareness. In contrast, body postures did not trigger significant physiological differentiation, except for pupil dilation, which increased for inverted bodies, likely reflecting cognitive load. Phobic stimuli, particularly intact images of threatening animals, heightened autonomic responses preconsciously, supporting the evolutionary significance of threat detection. Individual differences shaped these effects. Higher empathy correlated with greater preconscious pupil dilation in response to emotional faces, whereas individuals with lower social tendencies exhibited reduced pupil reactivity. For body stimuli, alexithymic traits were linked to increased facial muscle activity, suggesting heightened muscle tension in socially anxious individuals. Moreover, arachnophobia influenced early visual and physiological responses, with phobic participants displaying delayed reactions to intact spider images, likely reflecting avoidance mechanisms. Overall, our findings emphasize that perception is not a passive process but is shaped by social experiences, personality traits, and bodily states, even at a preconscious level. This supports the idea that our perceptual and physiological systems are intrinsically linked to individual differences, reinforcing the embodied and socially embedded nature of perception.