Only irrelevant sad but not happy faces are inhibited under high perceptual load

Abstract

Perceptual load plays a critical role in identification and awareness of stimuli. Given the differences in emotion-attention interactions, we investigated the perception of distractor emotional faces in two different load conditions under divided attention with a task based on the inattentional blindness paradigm. Participants performed a low- or high-load task with a string of letters presented against a happy, sad or neutral face (in a circular form) as the background. Participants were asked to identify the face that appeared in the critical trial. Results indicate an interaction between emotion and load. First, identification of faces with happy expression was better than chance and unaffected by load. Second, performance was worse than chance for faces with sad expression in the high-load condition, indicating inhibition of unattended sad distractor faces in the critical trial. This indicates that inhibitory processes during a difficult attentional task under divided attention influence subsequent perception of distractor stimuli especially sad faces. The results have implications for the theories of selective attention as well as the role of emotions in conscious perception.

RETRACTED: The effects of perceptual load in processing emotional facial expression in psychotic disorders

“…None of the faces used in the practice trials were used in the experiment trials. The main experiment contained 384 trials, 192 for each perceptual load (equally distributed by emotion type) (see Gupta and Srinivasan, 2015;Gupta et al, 2016;Soares et al, 2015;Wiens and Syrjänen, 2013; for similar procedures). Response times (RT) and accuracy were analysed.…”

Attention Capture of Non-target Emotional Faces: An Evidence From Reward Learning

“…As is known, emotional stimuli always receive priority attention as compared to non-emotional stimuli (Batty and Taylor, 2003;Vimal, 2008;Hodsoll et al, 2011;Barratt and Bundesen, 2012;Ikeda et al, 2013;Schmidt et al, 2015;Pool et al, 2016;Glickman and Lamy, 2017), with the exception of instances with a high percepetion load (Yates et al, 2010;Gupta and Srinivasan, 2015). In addition, early attention bias for negative emotion (such as fearful faces), in which people can quickly detect negative and threatening stimuli, has returned relatively consistent empirical results (Hansen and Hansen, 1988;Luo et al, 2010;Pinkham et al, 2010).…”

Older adults detect happy facial expressions less rapidly

“…Recent studies on the relationship between emotion and attention in young adults have revealed that both positive and negative stimuli are automatically processed and rapidly capture attention [20][21][22][23]. Accumulating evidence suggests that the attention-capturing power of positive stimuli may be even stronger than that of negative stimuli when emotional stimuli are presented as distractors while participants engage in tasks that demand attention [22,24,25]. For instance, using positive and negative faces as distractors, Gupta et al [22] found that only positive distractors compromised participant performance in a highload letter-search task, although both positive and negative faces distracted participants under lowload conditions.…”

“…For instance, using positive and negative faces as distractors, Gupta et al [22] found that only positive distractors compromised participant performance in a highload letter-search task, although both positive and negative faces distracted participants under lowload conditions. This is explained by the nature of positive stimuli, which readily capture attention and are difficult to ignore even in resource-demanding situations, because the attentional resources required to note positive stimuli are less than those required to recognize negative stimuli [22,25]. This is supported by various studies that have explored the processing of positive stimuli using various methods [24,26,27].…”