The face in the crowd revisited: A threat advantage with schematic stimuli.

Abstract

Schematic threatening, friendly, and neutral faces were used to test the hypothesis that humans preferentially orient their attention toward threat. Using a visual search paradigm, participants searched for discrepant faces in matrices of otherwise identical faces. Across 5 experiments, results consistently showed faster and more accurate detection of threatening than friendly targets. The threat advantage was obvious regardless of whether the conditions favored parallel or serial search (i.e., involved neutral or emotional distractors), and it was valid for inverted faces. Threatening angry faces were more quickly and accurately detected than were other negative faces (sad or "scheming"), which suggests that the threat advantage can be attributed to threat rather than to the negative valence or the uniqueness of the target display.

Attentional bias to angry faces using the dot-probe task? It depends when you look for it

“…Independent of the mechanism responsible for the effects observed in the current study the data show a pattern that is consistent with other studies looking at attention to emotional faces in 'normal' populations; namely facilitated processing of threat related stimuli (Ohman et al, 2001, Fox et al, 2000. This is in line with recent models of attention to threat which have suggested an attentional bias towards threat is a universal feature of human cognitive processing (Mathews & Mackintosh, 1998; and not just present in anxious individuals as was suggested previously (Eysenck, 1992).…”

“…Bradley et al 1997). It is even more surprising given the wealth of evidence using a variety of other paradigms that angry faces do indeed capture attention in normal, non-anxious populations (Ohman, Lundqvist, & Esteves, 2001;Fox, Lester, Russo, Bowles, Pichler, & Dutton, 2000;Eastwood, Smilek, & Merikle, 2003;White, 1995).…”

Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social-emotional development.

“…Specifically, if young infants typically had positive everyday interactions, then their evaluative neutral point, rather than being equidistant from positive and negative evaluations, would shift closer to positive evaluations; this would 7 Some researchers (e.g., Bohner, Bless, Schwarz, & Strack, 1988;Kellermann, 1984) have attempted to rule this out by manipulating the probability and the negativity of events independently and revealing a negativity bias even when the negative and positive events occurred equally frequently (see also Eastwood, Smilek, & Merikle, 2001;Fox et al, 2000;Hansen & Hansen, 1988;Öhman, Lundqvist, & Esteves, 2001;Pratto & John, 1991). Note, however, that if in our daily lives, we do generally experience more positive than negative outcomes, and negative outcomes do therefore stand out, then when faced with an artificial research situation in which there is an equal or higher probability of negative outcomes, we might nevertheless display a negativity bias (Baumeister et al, 2001;Taylor, 1991).…”

Emotional scenes and facial expressions elicit different psychophysiological responses

“…Moreover, facial expressions are generally thought to be biologically rooted , comparable across cultures (Ekman et al, 1969), and they clearly evoke emotional responses in everyday life (Dimberg, 1982). Similar to pictures of emotional scenes (e.g., Alpers, 2008), emotional expressions have been shown to capture attention in visual search tasks (Hansen and Hansen, 1988;Öhman et al, 2001) and in the dot-probe deployment paradigm Mogg and Bradley, 2002). Within the framework of the somatic marker hypothesis it has been argued that the perception of an emotional expression involves the simulation of the emotional state within the relevant cortical circuitry of the observer (Adolphs, 2002).…”