Eye gaze, as a type of unique nonverbal social cues, can trigger a reflexive attentional orienting effect that is crucial for human adaptive social behaviors. Adopting the central cueing paradigm and its variants, recent studies have been increasingly focused on the modulation of social information conveyed by faces, especially facial expressions, on this attentional effect. Specifically, facial expressions communicate other individuals’ internal affective states. When combined with gaze direction, they could reliably indicate others’ affective evaluation regarding the nature of the relevant object of interest and therefore modulate the gaze-triggered attentional effect. Such emotional modulation varies for different types of emotions and is more salient for fear and anger. Additionally, it would be further influenced by task-relevant (i.e., task dynamics, target valence) and individual factors (i.e., anxiety, fearfulness, autistic quotient, and social cognitive disorders). This modulation effect emerges from infancy and matures with age. It occurred rapidly and is associated with the two different attentional components (i.e., the early orienting and the later disengagement). Both the separate and integral neural processing of facial expressions and gaze directions, involving the brain regions of the amygdala and the posterior superior temporal sulcus, were implicated in this modulation. Apart from facial expressions, other types of social information contained in faces (e.g., trustworthiness, familiarity, facial dominance, social status, and groups) could also modulate the gaze-triggered orienting, which potentially engages the frontal eye field and the frontoparietal attention network. A systematic review of the behavioral evidence of the modulation and its neural mechanisms has significant theoretical and clinical implications. On the one hand, it will deepen our understandings of the relationship between face processing and gaze-triggered orienting. On the other hand, it may also contribute to the diagnosis and intervention of social cognitive disorders.