Attentional demand induced by visual crowding modulates the anger superiority effect

Abstract

Previous research on emotional bias in face perception has shown inconsistent findings, proposing either angry or happy faces to be detected more efficiently. A recent study showed that the anger superiority effect (ASE), which showed in the high attentional demand condition, vanished in the low attentional demand condition. The authors thus proposed an attentional demands modulation hypothesis to interpret the inconsistent findings. The present study tested this hypothesis in a visual crowding task in which participants were instructed to determine whether the target face was happy or angry. Attentional demands were manipulated by changing the strength of crowding, including presenting stimuli in different configurations (Experiment 1), and setting different target-flanker separations and presenting stimuli in different eccentricities (Experiment 2). Experiment 1 showed an ASE when the stimulus configuration incurred a high attentional demand. Intriguingly, the ASE became weaker and then disappeared as the attentional demand became lower. Experiment 2 replicated this finding and showed that the ASE decreased as the target-flanker separation became larger. Together, these results suggest that the emergence and magnitude of ASE is modulated by attentional demands, which supports the attentional demands modulation hypothesis.

The availability of attentional resources modulates the anger superiority effect

“…The discrepancies are presumably due to the differences in the amount of attentional resources available for the facial expression discrimination. Participants in studies that show an ASE in recognition tasks have to divide attention with another task (the current study) or consume attentional resources to preclude interference from task-relevant distractors (Gong & Li, 2022;Gong & Smart, 2021), in contrast to other studies that show an HSE (e.g., . In other words, the ASE is more likely to appear when less attention is available for facial expression discrimination.…”

“…Following this observation, they proposed the Attentional Demands Modulation Hypothesis, which assumed that the emergence of the ASE was contingent on attentional demands of the task. By manipulating attentional demands more systematically, Gong and Li (2022) further verified this hypothesis. Unlike Gong and colleagues who employed a visual crowding task, the present study used a dual task in which attentional resources had to be allocated to both the facial expression discrimination task and the letter discrimination task.…”

“…Results showed that an ASE appeared when the target face was crowded by other faces, but it disappeared when the target face was uncrowded. A subsequent study by Gong and Li (2022) replicated this result by manipulating the attentional demands more systematically. It was showed that the ASE appeared when the attentional demand of a task was high, attenuated as attentional demand decreased, and disappeared when attentional demand was low.…”

“…It was showed that the ASE appeared when the attentional demand of a task was high, attenuated as attentional demand decreased, and disappeared when attentional demand was low. Therefore, an Attentional Demands Modulation Hypothesis was proposed to illustrate these findings (Gong & Li, 2022; Gong & Smart, 2021). This hypothesis claims that the emergence and magnitude of the ASE is modulated by the attentional demand of a task.…”

Emotional interference and attentional control in schizophrenia-spectrum disorders: The special case of neutral faces

“…Attention involves two partially segregated systems: an endogenous system, responsible for the voluntary selection of target stimuli; and an exogenous system, automatically activated when salient stimuli are exhibited outside attentional focus (Egeth & Yantis, 1997;Posner, 1980;Theeuwes, 1994), as can happen for emotional stimuli (Carretié, 2014). There is compelling evidence of preferential processing of emotional versus non-emotional stimuli in healthy individualsmainly for threat-related stimuli, such as snakes (e.g., Gomes, Soares, Silva, & Silva, 2018;Langeslag & van Strien, 2018;Soares, Lindström, Esteves, & Öhman, 2014;Öhman, Soares, Juth, Lindström, & Esteves, 2012) and angry faces (e.g., Gong & Li, 2022;Pinkham, Griffin, Baron, Sasson, & Gur, 2010;Shasteen, Sasson, & Pinkham, 2014;Öhman, Lundqvist, & Esteves, 2001), but see Pool, Brosch, Delplanque, and Sander (2016). This appears to arise from a subcortical pathway to the amygdala (e.g., McFadyen, Mattingley, & Garrido, 2019;Méndez-Bértolo et al, 2016) and to enhance the detection of a potential hazard in the environment (LeDoux, 2022;Öhman, 2005).…”