Task Demands Modulate Effects of Threatening Faces on Early Perceptual Encoding

Burra, Nicolas; Kerzel, Dirk

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02400

Cited by 11 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 70 publications

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“…Findings might differ when faces or the expression itself are task-relevant (Rigoulot et al, 2011(Rigoulot et al, , 2012Rossignol et al, 2012; see also Schyns et al, 2007). A recent study by Burra and Kerzel (2019) showed that lateralized emotional N170 effects depend on the attention task. The authors reasoned that the increased sensitivity to faces due to task instructions also increased the sensitivity to facial expressions and amplifies peripherally presented threatening expressions (Burra & Kerzel, 2019).…”

Section: Stimulus Leftmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…A recent study by Burra and Kerzel (2019) showed that lateralized emotional N170 effects depend on the attention task. The authors reasoned that the increased sensitivity to faces due to task instructions also increased the sensitivity to facial expressions and amplifies peripherally presented threatening expressions (Burra & Kerzel, 2019). A taskdecency of N170 modulations is not reported for central face presentation (Itier & Neath-Tavares, 2017;Rellecke et al, 2011;, showing in general robust N170 emotional modulations (e.g., for a metaanalysis, see Hinojosa et al, 2015).…”

Section: Stimulus Leftmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Early ERP functions are indexed by lateralized effects to peripherally presented emotional faces and scrambles

et al. 2021

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Section: Stimulus Leftmentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Stimulus Leftmentioning

confidence: 99%

Early ERP functions are indexed by lateralized effects to peripherally presented emotional faces and scrambles

et al. 2021

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“…Going toward a similar direction, a recent study observed an enhanced N170 component for emotional as compared to neutral face expressions when participants were asked to recognize the gender of laterally presented faces. Interestingly, this effect disappeared when participants were asked, rather than responding on a dimension of the faces, to detect a missing pixel of the central fixation cross, providing further evidence of a modulation of task demands on emotional features interference (Burra and Kerzel, 2019).…”

mentioning

confidence: 89%

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

et al. 2020

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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.

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“…There were no missing trials in the combined visual task. Following Burra and Kerzel [34], participants with < 70% correct trials on either visual search or match/no-match test were excluded from analysis (n = 18). Incorrect responses on both visual search and match/no-match were removed from the dataset analyses [48].…”

Section: Plos Onementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Given this guidance effect [32,33], we expected social stimuli held in WM as templates to constrain allocation of cognitive resources to stimuli matching internal representations. Additionally, participants were expected to preferentially encode [34] and maintain angry faces in WM [35] thereby tending to allocate cognitive resources toward angry or hostile stimuli (i.e., an anger superiority effect). Lastly, we explored unmapped links between WM modulations of visual attention and later stages in social information processing.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Working memory guidance of visual attention to threat in offenders

2022

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Aggression and trait anger have been linked to attentional biases toward angry faces and attribution of hostile intent in ambiguous social situations. Memory and emotion play a crucial role in social-cognitive models of aggression but their mechanisms of influence are not fully understood. Combining a memory task and a visual search task, this study investigated the guidance of attention allocation toward naturalistic face targets during visual search by visual working memory (WM) templates in 113 participants who self-reported having served a custodial sentence. Searches were faster when angry faces were held in working memory regardless of the emotional valence of the visual search target. Higher aggression and trait anger predicted increased working memory modulated attentional bias. These results are consistent with the Social-Information Processing model, demonstrating that internal representations bias attention allocation to threat and that the bias is linked to aggression and trait anger.

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Task Demands Modulate Effects of Threatening Faces on Early Perceptual Encoding

Cited by 11 publications

References 70 publications

Early ERP functions are indexed by lateralized effects to peripherally presented emotional faces and scrambles

Early ERP functions are indexed by lateralized effects to peripherally presented emotional faces and scrambles

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

Working memory guidance of visual attention to threat in offenders

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