Negative and Positive Bias for Emotional Faces: Evidence from the Attention and Working Memory Paradigms

Abstract

Visual attention and visual working memory (VWM) are two major cognitive functions for humans, and they have much in common. A growing body of research has investigated emotional information’s effect on visual attention and VWM. Interestingly, contradictory findings have supported both a negative bias and a positive bias toward emotional faces (e.g. angry faces or happy faces) in the attention and VWM fields. We found that the classical paradigms—that is, the visual search paradigm in attention and the change detection paradigm in VWM—are considerably similar. The settings of these paradigms could be responsible for these contradictory results. In this paper, we compare previous controversial results from behavioral and neuroscience studies using these two paradigms. We suggest three possible contributing factors that have significant impacts on the controversial conclusion of different emotional bias effects, namely: stimulus choice, experimental setting, and cognitive process. Finally, we propose new research directions and guidelines for future studies.