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There has been a recent surge in the study of ensemble coding, the idea that the visual system represents a set of similar items using summary statistics (Alvarez & Oliva, 2008; Ariely, 2001; Chong & Treisman, 2003; Parkes, Lund, Angelucci, Solomon, & Morgan, 2001). We previously demonstrated that this ability extends to faces and thus requires a high level of object processing (Haberman & Whitney, 2007, 2009). Recent debate has centered on the nature of the summary representation of size (e.g., Myczek & Simons, 2008) and whether the perceived average simply reflects the sampling of a very small subset of the items in a set. In the present study, we explored this further in the context of faces, asking observers to judge the average expressions of sets of faces containing emotional outliers. Our results suggest that the visual system implicitly and unintentionally discounts the emotional outliers, thereby …