An alternative to the view that during evolution the human brain became specialized to preferentially attend to threat-related stimuli is to assume that all classes of stimuli that have high biological significance are prioritized by the attention system. Newborns are highly biologically relevant stimuli for members of a species, as their survival is important for reproductive success. The authors examined whether the Kindchenschema (baby schema) as described by Lorenz (1943) captures attention in the dot probe task. The results confirm attentional capture by photos of human infants presented to the left visual field, suggesting right hemisphere advantage. The magnitude of the attentional modulation was highly correlated with subjective arousal ratings of the photos. The findings show that biologically significant positive stimuli are prioritized by the attention system.

Despite an initial focus on negative threatening stimuli, researchers have more recently expanded the investigation of attentional biases toward positive rewarding stimuli. The present meta-analysis systematically compared attentional bias for positive compared with neutral visual stimuli across 243 studies (N ϭ 9,120 healthy participants) that used different types of attentional paradigms and positive stimuli. Factors were tested that, as postulated by several attentional models derived from theories of emotion, might modulate this bias. Overall, results showed a significant, albeit modest (Hedges' g ϭ .258), attentional bias for positive as compared with neutral stimuli. Moderator analyses revealed that the magnitude of this attentional bias varied as a function of arousal and that this bias was significantly larger when the emotional stimulus was relevant to specific concerns (e.g., hunger) of the participants compared with other positive stimuli that were less relevant to the participants' concerns. Moreover, the moderator analyses showed that attentional bias for positive stimuli was larger in paradigms that measure early, rather than late, attentional processing, suggesting that attentional bias for positive stimuli occurs rapidly and involuntarily. Implications for theories of emotion and attention are discussed.Keywords: attentional bias, positive emotion, reward, emotional theories, attention Emotions guide behavior (e.g., approach or avoidance), modulate many cognitive processes (e.g., memory and decision making), and signal the presence of important events in the environment . When several stimuli compete for access to the limited attentional resources of an individual, a bias toward emotional stimuli allows efficient detection of these events and rapid preparation of adaptive reactions (Pourtois, Schettino, & Vuilleumier, 2013). Attentional bias for emotional stimuli has attracted considerable interest in neuroscience (Vuilleumier, 2005) and psychology (Van Bockstaele et al., 2014;Yiend, 2010). Initially, experimental research in both fields mainly focused on the negative emotion of fear. Indeed, fear was one of the first emotions investigated in an experimental setting in neuroscience through fear conditioning in rodents (see LeDoux, 1996). The earliest investigations in human research tried to extend these findings with the use of fear-relevant stimuli such as faces expressing fear or anger (Mogg & Bradley, 1998;Vuilleumier, Armony, Driver, & Dolan, 2001). In addition, a large corpus of studies investigated attentional bias for threatening stimuli in healthy participants, as well as in participants experiencing a variety of anxiety disorders (for an encompassing meta-analysis on anxious and nonanxious participants, see Bar-Haim, Lamy, Pergamin, Bakermans-Kranenburg, & van IJzendoorn, 2007).Despite this initial focus on threatening stimuli, researchers have more recently expanded the investigation of attentional biases to rewarding stimuli. In the last decade, the topic of attentional bias for these...

Facial expressions are of eminent importance for social interaction as they convey information about other individuals’ emotions and social intentions. According to the predominant “basic emotion” approach, the perception of emotion in faces is based on the rapid, automatic categorization of prototypical, universal expressions. Consequently, the perception of facial expressions has typically been investigated using isolated, de-contextualized, static pictures of facial expressions that maximize the distinction between categories. However, in everyday life, an individual’s face is not perceived in isolation, but almost always appears within a situational context, which may arise from other people, the physical environment surrounding the face, as well as multichannel information from the sender. Furthermore, situational context may be provided by the perceiver, including already present social information gained from affective learning and implicit processing biases such as race bias. Thus, the perception of facial expressions is presumably always influenced by contextual variables. In this comprehensive review, we aim at (1) systematizing the contextual variables that may influence the perception of facial expressions and (2) summarizing experimental paradigms and findings that have been used to investigate these influences. The studies reviewed here demonstrate that perception and neural processing of facial expressions are substantially modified by contextual information, including verbal, visual, and auditory information presented together with the face as well as knowledge or processing biases already present in the observer. These findings further challenge the assumption of automatic, hardwired categorical emotion extraction mechanisms predicted by basic emotion theories. Taking into account a recent model on face processing, we discuss where and when these different contextual influences may take place, thus outlining potential avenues in future research.

Over the past decade, choice architecture interventions or so-called nudges have received widespread attention from both researchers and policy makers. Built on insights from the behavioral sciences, this class of behavioral interventions focuses on the design of choice environments that facilitate personally and socially desirable decisions without restricting people in their freedom of choice. Drawing on more than 200 studies reporting over 450 effect sizes (n = 2,149,683), we present a comprehensive analysis of the effectiveness of choice architecture interventions across techniques, behavioral domains, and contextual study characteristics. Our results show that choice architecture interventions overall promote behavior change with a small to medium effect size of Cohen’s d = 0.45 (95% CI [0.39, 0.52]). In addition, we find that the effectiveness of choice architecture interventions varies significantly as a function of technique and domain. Across behavioral domains, interventions that target the organization and structure of choice alternatives (decision structure) consistently outperform interventions that focus on the description of alternatives (decision information) or the reinforcement of behavioral intentions (decision assistance). Food choices are particularly responsive to choice architecture interventions, with effect sizes up to 2.5 times larger than those in other behavioral domains. Overall, choice architecture interventions affect behavior relatively independently of contextual study characteristics such as the geographical location or the target population of the intervention. Our analysis further reveals a moderate publication bias toward positive results in the literature. We end with a discussion of the implications of our findings for theory and behaviorally informed policy making.

When we perceive our environment, we rapidly integrate large amounts of incoming stimulus information into categories which help to guide our understanding of the world. Some stimuli are more relevant for our well-being and survival than others, for example stimuli that signal a threat or an opportunity for growth and expansion. In this review we examine the special role of such "emotional" stimuli in perception and categorization. To this end, we first discuss some fundamental aspects of perception, with an emphasis on the cognitive process of categorization. We then tackle the questions "what is an emotional stimulus", and "what is an emotion category".Afterwards, we illustrate with a review of key findings from the empirical literature (a) how stimuli are categorized as emotional, and (b) how the perceptual processing of emotional stimuli is prioritized to allow for a rapid preparation of adaptive responses.To conclude, we discuss how research on the perception of emotional stimuli can contribute to current debates in psychology, namely (a) about the role of bottom-up vs. top-down factors in emotional processing and experience, and (b) about the nature of the relationship between cognition and emotion.3