Detection of emotional faces: Salient physical features guide effective visual search.

Abstract

In this study, the authors investigated how salient visual features capture attention and facilitate detection of emotional facial expressions. In a visual search task, a target emotional face (happy, disgusted, fearful, angry, sad, or surprised) was presented in an array of neutral faces. Faster detection of happy and, to a lesser extent, surprised and disgusted faces was found both under upright and inverted display conditions. Inversion slowed down the detection of these faces less than that of others (fearful, angry, and sad). Accordingly, the detection advantage involves processing of featural rather than configural information. The facial features responsible for the detection advantage are located in the mouth rather than the eye region. Computationally modeled visual saliency predicted both attentional orienting and detection. Saliency was greatest for the faces (happy) and regions (mouth) that were fixated earlier and detected faster, and there was close correspondence between the onset of the modeled saliency peak and the time at which observers initially fixated the faces. The authors conclude that visual saliency of specific facial features--especially the smiling mouth--is responsible for facilitated initial orienting, which thus shortens detection. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved).

Visuomotor integration of relevant and irrelevant angry and fearful facial expressions

“…Indeed, a great debate has long divided psychologists (e.g., Coelho, Cloete, & Wallis, 2010;Goffaux & Rossion, 2006): What is really processed when attention is directed toward a face in general, or an emotional face in particular: the local features or the face as a whole? Arguments in favor of both sides coexist (e.g., Calvo & Nummenmaa, 2008;Horstmann, Becker, Bergmann, & Burghaus, 2010). Our results seem to go toward the local feature processing hypothesis for emotion integration when the latter is task irrelevant, as emotion-action binding is close to significance only when participants focus on the details of the faces.…”

The Emotional Content of Faces Interferes with Inhibitory Processing: An Event Related Potential Study

“…As a result, one might expect that it would be more difficult to disentangle attention from anger than from happiness. However, observations have shown that happy faces are more efficiently detected than anger in visual search paradigms (Becker, Anderson, et al, 2011;Calvo & Nummenmaa, 2008) and that response inhibition is more difficult with happy stimuli than negative ones (Schulz et al, 2007). In the present study, these two emotions induced similar processing effects in terms of both processing time and the resources involved.…”

Distracted by danger: Temporal and spatial dynamics of visual selection in the presence of threat

“…Eight participants were presented with a red CS+ and a green CS-and eight participants vice versa. Due to this method, a comparison between the two conditions was not confounded by potential differences in visual features between stimuli (e.g., Calvo & Nummenmaa, 2008;Hunt et al, 2007). The US consisted of a 200 ms 100 dB white noise that ended with the offset of the CS+.…”

“…First, the CS+ serves as a cue for a possible aversive event to the participant, whereas a threatening picture of a snake, for example, is a symbolic representation of that threat. Second, the visual features between the CS+ and CS-distractor are more easily controlled for (colors are counterbalanced between subjects), whereas visual features between threatening and nonthreatening pictures are sometimes more difficult to control for (e.g., Calvo & Nummenmaa, 2008;Hunt et al, 2007;Tipples, Young, Quinlan, Broks, & Ellis, 2002).…”