Infrequent facial expressions of emotion do not bias attention

Autor: Joshua W Maxwell, Danielle Sanchez, Eric Ruthruff
Rok vydání: 2023
Předmět:
Zdroj: Psychological Research.
ISSN: 1430-2772
0340-0727
Popis: Despite the obvious importance of facial expressions of emotion, most studies have found that they do not bias attention. A critical limitation, however, is that these studies generally present face cues on all trials of the experiment. For other kinds of emotional stimuli such as emotional scenes, infrequently presented cues elicit greater attentional bias than frequently presented cues, perhaps due to suppression or habituation. The goal of the current study then was to test whether such modulation of attentional bias by cue frequency generalizes to facial expressions of emotion. In Experiment 1, both angry and happy faces were unable to bias attention, despite being rare. Even when the location of these face cues were more unpredictable – presented in one of two possible locations – still no attentional bias was observed (Experiment 2). Moreover, there were no differences in the presence cost for angry and happy faces shown under either high or low perceptual load (Experiment 3). We conclude that task-irrelevant infrequently presented posed facial expressions of emotion cannot bias attention.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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