Influence of Attention Control on Implicit and Explicit Emotion Processing of Face and Body: Evidence From Flanker and Same-or-Different Paradigms

Abstract

Many existing findings indicate that processing of emotional information is pre-attentive, largely immune from attentional control. Nevertheless, inconsistent evidence on the interference of emotional cues on cognitive processing suggests that this influence may be a highly conditional phenomenon. The aim of the present study was twofold:(1) to examine the modulation of attention control on emotion processing using facial expressions (2) explore the very same effect for emotional body expressions. In Experiment 1, participants performed a Flanker task in which they had to indicate either the emotion (happy/fearful) or the gender of the target stimulus while ignoring the distracting stimuli at the side. We found evidence for intrusion of the emotional dimension of a stimulus in both the emotion and gender discrimination performance, thus when either task-relevant or task-irrelevant. To further explore the influence of attention control mechanisms, in Experiment 2 participants performed a same-ordifferent judgment task in which they were asked to pay attention to both the central and lateral stimuli and indicated whether the central stimulus matched the lateral for emotion or gender. Results showed that emotional features exerted an influence at an implicit level (i.e., during gender judgments) for bodies only. Gender features did not affect emotional processing in either experiments. To rule out the possibility that this effect was driven by postural rather than emotional features of fearful vs. happy stimuli, a control experiment was conducted. In Experiment 3, bodies with an opening/up-ward or closing/down-ward posture but with no emotional valence were presented. Results revealed that the body posture did not influence gender discrimination. Findings suggest that the emotional valence of a face or body stimulus can overpass attention filtering mechanisms, independently from the level of attentional modulation (Experiment 1). However, broadening the focus of attention to include the Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org 1 January 2020 | Volume 10 | Article 2971Oldrati et al. Emotion Intrusion on Attentional Controllateral stimuli led emotional information to intrude on the main task, exerting an implicit, bottom-up influence on gender processing, only when conveyed by bodies (Experiment 2). Results point to different mechanisms for the implicit processing of face and body emotional expressions, with the latter likely having role on action preparation processes.

Emotional body postures affect inhibitory control only when task-relevant

“…Two studies tried assessing the role of task relevance using a within-participant design. One is in line with our results ( Gandolfo and Downing, 2020 ), suggesting that attention can filter out task-irrelevant emotions, while the latter does not ( Oldrati et al, 2019 ). The interpretation is difficult as both studies have limitations.…”

“…We trust our results for several reasons. First, we adopted a within-design, and our sample was larger than in previous similar studies ( Oldrati et al, 2019 ; Gandolfo and Downing, 2020 ). Second, visual features cannot explain the results, as the same pictures were shown in the Emotional and Color Discrimination tasks.…”

“…Scrutinizing again the papers available in the literature found with the systematic review illustrated in Figure 1 , we identify seven studies in which participants had to provide a manual response to the presentation of emotional body images. Two studies did not report the RTs to different categories of emotional stimuli (e.g., fearful or happy body expressions Oldrati et al, 2019 ; Gandolfo and Downing, 2020 ). The five remaining works provided highly contrasting results as the effect of body expressions changes continuously (see Table 2 ).…”

“…These results were interpreted as the emotional value of the stimuli could not be filtered out even when it was task-irrelevant. Interestingly, however, Oldrati et al (2019) obtained different results in a second experiment in which participants were required to match the emotion or the gender of the central and lateral stimuli. They found that, during the Gender Task, participants were less efficient in giving a gender judgment when the valence of the middle images was incongruent with that of the flankers, provided that pictures represented body postures.…”

“…As Figure 1 shows, we found just two studies that satisfied our stringent criteria. Oldrati et al (2019) investigated whether the processing of emotional information conveyed by facial and body expressions is automatic, i.e., pre-attentive or not. To this end, they performed two experiments.…”