Neural evidence for the threat detection advantage: Differential attention allocation to angry and happy faces

Abstract

Threat stimuli are considered to be processed with higher priority due to an automatic threat detection system that enables rapid shifts of attention. However, direct evidence is still missing. The present study used the face-in-the-crowd task and event-related potentials to find evidence for the functionality of attention shifts in threat detection. The threat detection advantage was replicated in the behavioral results. An N2pc was observed that was more pronounced and earlier for angry compared to happy faces, suggesting differential attention allocation underlying the threat detection advantage. A larger sustained posterior contralateral negativity indicated that angry faces also gained more enhanced subsequent processing. An early posterior negativity observed 160 ms after stimulus onset revealed early emotion-specific processing that may have caused differences in attention allocation toward threatening stimuli.

The grammar of anger: Mapping the computational architecture of a recalibrational emotion

“…Specifically, the human mind is predicted to be equipped with mechanisms that come online when an individual is the target of anger and function to deactivate the other person's anger mechanism. The existence of this mechanism is supported by research showing specialized perceptual systems that respond to the anger face (Feldmann-Wustefeld, Schmidt-Daffy, & Schubo, 2011;Öhman et al, 2001). Furthermore, the structure of the anger-disabling strategies can be predicted from the form of the anger system itself, and thus provide testable hypotheses about the recalibrational theory.…”

“I never forget a face, but in your case I’ll be glad to make an exception”: Intentional forgetting of emotional faces.

“…As noted earlier, a larger N2pc component of the ERP waveform emerges within ϳ230 ms for angry faces and ϳ280 ms for happy faces (Feldmann-Wüstefeld et al, 2011), pointing to differences in attention that arise midway through our shortest face presentation duration (500 ms, Experiment 1). If these early differences produced a faster rise to asymptote than we have presumed, then by the time the faces were removed and the memory instructions presented in our experiments, encoding might already have reached theoretical asymptote.…”

Reduced Sensitivity to Emotional Facial Expressions in Borderline Personality Disorder: Effects of Emotional Valence and Intensity

“…This assumption is supported by imaging data which have failed to show activation differences in brain areas such as the amygdala between both happy and angry faces and faces differing from distractors only in regard to perceptual characteristics such as mouth color (Santos, Mier, Kirsch, & Meyer-Lindenberg, 2011). However, other studies have argued in favor of a differential cerebral processing of happy and angry faces and thus support the existence of a superiority for the detection of threatsignaling faces (Feldmann-Wustefeld, Schmidt-Daffy, & Schubo, 2011;Weymar, Löw, Öhman, & Hamm, 2011). In the present study, the decreasing difference in search slopes between happy and angry faces with less intense emotional expression in nonpatients might indicate an adaptation of search processes due to an increase in similarity of perceptual features of both emotions, and thus to the importance of perceptual features in visual search.…”