engleski

Who would you notice first: a friend or a foe? The facilitated processing of threatening faces

In this study we addressed the relation between emotion and attention by testing the hypothesis regarding the preferential detection of negative stimuli. We used a visual search task with a set of angry, happy and neutral faces to test whether an advantage to detect angry compared with happy faces exists. Participants searched for a discrepant (happy or angry) face in a set of otherwise identical (neutral) faces and we compared the time needed to identify the angry and happy face in a set of neutral. In the second experimental situation the participants had the same task of identifying a particular happy or angry face in a set of neutral ones, but their search was more difficult because we added additional emotional distracters discrepant to their target face. With this manipulation we tested whether angry faces were more disruptive to the participants' task of finding happy faces than vice versa. Shorter visual search for angry faces and bigger distracter effect of angry faces on the search of happy ones would indicate an advantage in processing angry faces. The results will be discussed in the context of evolutionary hypothesis according to which people are biased to successfully avoiding threat in order to survive and therefore have to be able to efficiently analyze such stimuli.

facial expression; emotions; visual attenti

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