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Wirth BE, Wentura D. Social processing modulates the initial allocation of attention towards angry faces: evidence from the N2pc component. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci 2023; 18:nsad070. [PMID: 37971294 PMCID: PMC10689156 DOI: 10.1093/scan/nsad070] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/21/2023] [Revised: 10/09/2023] [Accepted: 11/14/2023] [Indexed: 11/19/2023] Open
Abstract
Previous research has shown that attentional bias towards angry faces is moderated by the activation of a social processing mode. More specifically, reliable cueing effects for angry face cues in the dot-probe task only occurred when participants performed a task that required social processing of the target stimuli. However, cueing effects are a rather distal measure of covert shifts in spatial attention. Thus, it remains unclear whether the social processing mode modulates initial allocation of attention to or attentional disengagement from angry faces. In the present study, we used the N2pc, an event-related potential component, as an index of attentional shifts towards angry faces. Participants performed a dot-probe task with two different target conditions while the electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded. In the social target condition, target stimuli were socially meaningful (schematic faces), and in the non-social target condition, they were meaningless (scrambled schematic faces). The amplitude of the N2pc component elicited by angry face cues was significantly larger in the social target condition than in the non-social target condition. This pattern also occurred for behavioural cueing effects. These results suggest that the activation of a social processing mode due to current task demands affects the initial allocation of attention towards angry faces.
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Affiliation(s)
- Benedikt Emanuel Wirth
- Department of Psychology, Saarland University, Campus A2 4, Saarbrücken 66123, Germany
- Cognitive Assistants Department, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Campus D3 1, Saarbrücken 66123, Germany
| | - Dirk Wentura
- Department of Psychology, Saarland University, Campus A2 4, Saarbrücken 66123, Germany
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Maxwell JW, Sanchez DN, Ruthruff E. Infrequent facial expressions of emotion do not bias attention. PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH 2023; 87:2449-2459. [PMID: 37258662 DOI: 10.1007/s00426-023-01844-6] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/13/2022] [Accepted: 05/22/2023] [Indexed: 06/02/2023]
Abstract
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 distractors on all trials of the experiment. For other kinds of emotional stimuli, such as emotional scenes, infrequently presented stimuli elicit greater attentional bias than frequently presented stimuli, perhaps due to suppression or habituation. The goal of the current study then was to test whether such modulation of attentional bias by distractor frequency generalizes to facial expressions of emotion. In Experiment 1, both angry and happy faces were unable to bias attention, despite being infrequently presented. 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 was no bottom-up influence for angry and happy faces shown under high or low perceptual load (Experiment 3). We conclude that task-irrelevant posed facial expressions of emotion cannot bias attention even when presented infrequently.
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Affiliation(s)
- Joshua W Maxwell
- Department of Psychology, 1 University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, 87131, USA.
| | - Danielle N Sanchez
- Department of Psychology, 1 University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, 87131, USA
| | - Eric Ruthruff
- Department of Psychology, 1 University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, 87131, USA
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Qiu Z, Lei X, Becker SI, Pegna AJ. Faces capture spatial attention only when we want them to: An inattentional blindness EEG study. Biol Psychol 2023; 183:108665. [PMID: 37619811 DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2023.108665] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/13/2023] [Revised: 08/16/2023] [Accepted: 08/21/2023] [Indexed: 08/26/2023]
Abstract
Previous research on emotional face processing has shown that emotional faces such as fearful faces may be processed without visual awareness. However, evidence for nonconscious attention capture by fearful faces is limited. In fact, studies using sensory manipulation of awareness (e.g., backward masking paradigms) have shown that fearful faces do not attract attention during subliminal viewings nor when they were task-irrelevant. Here, we used a three-phase inattentional blindness paradigm and electroencephalography to examine whether faces (fearful and neutral) capture attention under different conditions of awareness and task-relevancy. We found that the electrophysiological marker for attention capture, the N2-posterior-contralateral (N2pc), was elicited by face stimuli only when participants were aware of the faces and when they were task-relevant (phase 3). When participants were unaware of the presence of faces (phase 1) or when the faces were irrelevant to the task (phase 2), no N2pc was observed. Together with our previous work, we concluded that fearful faces, or faces in general, do not attract attention unless we want them to.
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Affiliation(s)
- Zeguo Qiu
- School of Psychology, The University of Queensland, Brisbane 4072, Australia.
| | - Xue Lei
- School of Psychology, The University of Queensland, Brisbane 4072, Australia
| | - Stefanie I Becker
- School of Psychology, The University of Queensland, Brisbane 4072, Australia
| | - Alan J Pegna
- School of Psychology, The University of Queensland, Brisbane 4072, Australia
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Emotional Intelligence and Emotional Hypersensitivity in Gifted Individuals. J Intell 2023; 11:jintelligence11020020. [PMID: 36826918 PMCID: PMC9968011 DOI: 10.3390/jintelligence11020020] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/07/2022] [Revised: 12/29/2022] [Accepted: 01/12/2023] [Indexed: 01/19/2023] Open
Abstract
The goal of the present study was to investigate the associations between high intelligence, emotional intelligence (EI), and emotional hypersensitivity in a sample of 304 Mensa members. In addition, we aimed to shed light on how highly intelligent individuals process emotional information. In a previous study, we found that individuals with high EI in the general population are characterized by an attentional bias toward emotional information. We tested whether this effect holds for highly intelligent individuals by drawing on the same procedure: participants (N = 124 Mensa members) had to report a letter appearing behind a picture of a face with emotional or a neutral facial expression, and their reaction time to provide an answer was recorded. Comparing the results from the general population to those of Mensa members, we found that Mensa members did not show the attentional bias toward emotional information found in the general population. Mensa members were equally fast to evaluate letters replacing emotional and neutral expressions, and this result was not influenced by EI level. Possible explanations include the role of inhibitory processes (a factor related to intelligence), which might have contributed to treating emotional information as purely cognitive.
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Dou H, Liang L, Ma J, Lu J, Zhang W, Li Y. Irrelevant task suppresses the N170 of automatic attention allocation to fearful faces. Sci Rep 2021; 11:11754. [PMID: 34083660 PMCID: PMC8175742 DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-91237-9] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/03/2020] [Accepted: 05/21/2021] [Indexed: 02/04/2023] Open
Abstract
Recent researches have provided evidence that stimulus-driven attentional bias for threats can be modulated by top-down goals. However, it is highlight essential to indicate whether and to what extent the top-down goals can affect the early stage of attention processing and its early neural mechanism. In this study, we collected electroencephalographic data from 28 healthy volunteers with a modified spatial cueing task. The results revealed that in the irrelevant task, there was no significant difference between the reaction time (RT) of the fearful and neutral faces. In the relevant task, we found that RT of fearful faces was faster than that of neutral faces in the valid cue condition, whereas the RT of fearful faces was slower than that of neutral faces in the invalid cue condition. The N170 component in our study showed a similar result compared with RT. Specifically, we noted that in the relevant task, fearful faces in the cue position of the target evoked a larger N170 amplitude than neutral faces, whereas this effect was suppressed in the irrelevant task. These results suggest that the irrelevant task may inhibit the early attention allocation to the fearful faces. Furthermore, the top-down goals can modulate the early attentional bias for threatening facial expressions.
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Affiliation(s)
- Haoran Dou
- grid.412600.10000 0000 9479 9538Institute for Brain and Psychological Sciences, Sichuan Normal University, Chengdu, 610068 China ,grid.9681.60000 0001 1013 7965Faculty of Education and Psychology, University of Jyvaskyla, Jyvaskyla, 40014 Finland
| | - Limei Liang
- grid.440818.10000 0000 8664 1765Research Center of Brain and Cognitive Neuroscience, Liaoning Normal University, Dalian, 116029 China
| | - Jie Ma
- grid.263785.d0000 0004 0368 7397School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510631 Guangdong China
| | - Jiachen Lu
- grid.263785.d0000 0004 0368 7397School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510631 Guangdong China
| | - Wenhai Zhang
- grid.412101.70000 0001 0377 7868College of Education Science, Hengyang Normal University, Hengyang, 421002 China
| | - Yang Li
- grid.413856.d0000 0004 1799 3643School of Psychology, Chengdu Medical College, Chengdu, 610500 China
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Zhou X, Du B, Wei Z, He W. Attention Capture of Non-target Emotional Faces: An Evidence From Reward Learning. Front Psychol 2020; 10:3004. [PMID: 32082205 PMCID: PMC7006031 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.03004] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/20/2019] [Accepted: 12/18/2019] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
Abstract
The aim of this study was to explore whether reward learning would affect the processing of targets when an emotional stimulus was task irrelevant. In the current study, using a visual search paradigm to establish an association between emotional faces and reward, an emotional face appeared as a task-irrelevant distractor during the test after reward learning, and participants were asked to judge the orientation of a line on the face. In experiment 1, no significant difference was found between the high reward-fear distractor condition and the no reward-neutral condition, but the response times of the high reward-fear condition were significantly longer than those of the low reward-happy condition. In experiment 2, there was no significant difference in participants' performance between high reward-happy and no reward-neutral responses. In addition, response times of the low reward-fear condition wear significantly longer than those of the high reward-happy and no reward-neutral conditions. The results show that reward learning affects attention bias of task-irrelevant emotional faces even when reward is absent. Moreover, the high reward selection history is more effective in weakening the emotional advantage of the processing advantage than the low reward.
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Affiliation(s)
- Xing Zhou
- Research Center of Brain and Cognitive Neuroscience, Liaoning Normal University, Dalian, China
| | - Bixuan Du
- Research Center of Brain and Cognitive Neuroscience, Liaoning Normal University, Dalian, China
| | - Zhiqing Wei
- School of Psychology, Northwest Normal University, Lanzhou, China
| | - Weiqi He
- Research Center of Brain and Cognitive Neuroscience, Liaoning Normal University, Dalian, China
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Victeur Q, Huguet P, Silvert L. Attentional allocation to task-irrelevant fearful faces is not automatic: experimental evidence for the conditional hypothesis of emotional selection. Cogn Emot 2019; 34:288-301. [PMID: 31130091 DOI: 10.1080/02699931.2019.1622512] [Citation(s) in RCA: 13] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.6] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 10/26/2022]
Abstract
A growing body of research indicates that attentional biases toward emotional stimuli are not automatic, but may depend on the relevance of emotion to the top-down search goals of the observer. To determine whether and how this relevance factor modulates attentional allocation to irrelevant fearful faces, four spatial cueing tasks were designed, in which the goal-relevance of completely task-irrelevant (neutral or fearful) cue faces was systematically manipulated by changing the target defining feature. No attentional capture by cue faces (be they neutral or fearful) was observed when the cue faces were completely goal-irrelevant. When faces - but not facial expressions - were goal-relevant, fearful cue faces captured attention, but so did neutral cue faces to a similar extent. Only when facial expressions were explicitly goal-relevant did we observe a difference between attentional allocation to fearful and neutral cue faces, with larger cueing effects for neutral cue faces in the Neutral task, and for fearful cue faces in the Fearful task. Therefore, rather than automatic, attentional allocation to irrelevant fearful faces proved conditional to the explicit relevance of fearful expressions to top-down search goals.
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Affiliation(s)
- Quentin Victeur
- CNRS, LAPSCO, Université Clermont Auvergne Clermont-Ferrand, France
| | - Pascal Huguet
- CNRS, LAPSCO, Université Clermont Auvergne Clermont-Ferrand, France
| | - Laetitia Silvert
- CNRS, LAPSCO, Université Clermont Auvergne Clermont-Ferrand, France
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Wirth BE, Wentura D. Attentional bias towards angry faces is moderated by the activation of a social processing mode in the general population. Cogn Emot 2018; 33:1317-1329. [PMID: 30587095 DOI: 10.1080/02699931.2018.1561423] [Citation(s) in RCA: 4] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 10/27/2022]
Abstract
Dot-probe studies usually find an attentional bias towards threatening stimuli only in anxious participants, but not in non-anxious participants. In the present study, we conducted two experiments to investigate whether attentional bias towards angry faces in unselected samples is moderated by the extent to which the current task requires social processing. In Experiment 1, participants performed a dot-probe task involving classification of either socially meaningful targets (schematic faces) or meaningless targets (scrambled schematic faces). Targets were preceded by two photographic face cues, one angry and one neutral. Angry face cues only produced significant cueing scores (i.e. faster target responses if the target replaced the angry face compared to the neutral face) with socially meaningful targets, not with meaningless targets. In Experiment 2, participants classified only meaningful targets, which were either socially meaningful (schematic faces) or not (schematic houses). Again, mean cueing scores were significantly moderated by the social character of the targets. However, cueing scores in this experiment were non-significant in the social target condition and significantly negative in the non-social target condition. These results suggest that attentional bias towards angry faces in the dot-probe task is moderated by the activation of a social processing mode in unselected samples.
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Affiliation(s)
| | - Dirk Wentura
- a Department of Psychology, Saarland University , Saarbrücken , Germany
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