Challenging the negativity bias in affective scene viewing: The role of social content

How does the brain prioritize information when visual scenes contain multiple sources of relevance? While emotionally evocative content has long been considered central to attentional capture, social content constitutes another key dimension of relevance. However, the neural mechanisms underlying the integration of these relevance dimensions remain unclear. We co-registered event-related potentials (ERPs) and eye movements while participants viewed complex scenes varying in social content (social, non-social) and emotional valence (positive, negative, neutral). Early ERP responses (P1) showed enhanced amplitudes for positive social images, suggesting that social relevance can mitigate the early-stage negativity bias. Social content also modulated the EPN, while emotional valence shaped later components (P300, LPC), with larger amplitudes for negative scenes. Eye-tracking measures mirrored these ERP effects: initial saccades were faster for social images, and fixation patterns indicated increased visual exploration for both positive and negative social scenes relative to neutral ones. Together, these results support a sequential appraisal process in which social content is prioritized at early perceptual stages, while emotional valence influences later evaluative processing. This pattern challenges the notion of a general negativity bias and underscores the interactive and stage-specific contributions of social and emotional relevance in affective scene perception.