When emotions guide your attention in line with a context-specific goal: Rapid utilization of visible and masked emotional faces for anticipatory attentional orienting.

Abstract

The emotional value of a stimulus influences how the stimulus itself is perceived, and can “automatically” give rise to processes whose characteristics are inherently related to the emotional content of the stimuli (e.g., emotion-specific action tendencies). However, to provide optimal contextual flexibility, we propose that emotional information can be utilized in an “automatic” manner for novel, goal-directed processes that are not inherently signaled by the emotional meaning of the stimulus. We investigated this question using the endogenous cueing paradigm: Specifically, we asked how rapidly, efficiently, and to what degree of specificity emotional expressions can be utilized to anticipate the location of targets. We tested the specificity of the utilized emotional information by presenting emotional faces with contrasting affective valence (i.e., joy and anger) or pairs of negative expressions (e.g., anger and fear) as informative central cues. By presenting both masked and visible face cues, we tested whether and to what degree of specificity facial expressions can be utilized to orient attention under conditions of limited cue awareness. Cue validity effects emerged consistently in all experiments, and cuing effects built up fast, already at 300 ms cue-target asynchrony, and—at least partly—on the basis of holistic face representation. These results indicate that emotional faces can be utilized in line with a context-specific goal, with high specificity, rapidly, and even on the basis of limited perceptual input, suggesting that the utilization of emotional information can combine remarkable efficiency and situational flexibility in order to achieve optimal outcomes in various critical situations.

Gender differences in subliminal affective face priming: A high‐density ERP study

“…Reports of SAPEs on subsequent supraliminally presented target faces demonstrated by ERP studies using the backward masking paradigm (Pegna et al., 2008; Smith, 2011) are currently inconclusive because of the overlapping ERP responses for prime and target faces. In the present study, we chose an SOA of 300 ms because it has been used in several previous studies (Chica et al., 2014; Fazio, 2001; Folyi et al., 2019) and has been shown to be effective for facilitating the affective priming effect. Moreover, Itier and Taylor (2002) demonstrated a repetition effect on N170 amplitude, in which repetition of the same face identity suppressed the N170 response, leading to increased N170 amplitude in prime‐target incongruent conditions (e.g., upright/inverted faces with the same identity or different identities).…”

“…Thus, SAPEs to subsequent supraliminally presented target‐face stimuli remain unclear because of the superimposition of ERP responses for the prime and target faces. In previous behavioral studies, affective priming effects have been obtained with a relatively short (300 ms) prime‐target interval (stimulus onset asynchrony; SOA) (Chica et al., 2014; Fazio, 2001; Folyi et al., 2019). Therefore, the current study sought to investigate neural activity accompanying SAPEs using high‐density EEG with the subliminal priming paradigm adapted from t hese studies .…”