The politics of the face-in-the-crowd.

Abstract

Recent work indicates that the more conservative one is, the faster one is to fixate on negative stimuli, whereas the less conservative one is, the faster one is to fixate on positive stimuli. The present series of experiments used the face-in-the-crowd paradigm to examine whether variability in the efficiency with which positive and negative stimuli are detected underlies such speed differences. Participants searched for a discrepant facial expression (happy or angry) amid a varying number of neutral distractors (Experiments 1 and 4). A combination of response time and eye movement analyses indicated that variability in search efficiency explained speed differences for happy expressions, whereas variability in post-selectional processes explained speed differences for angry expressions. These results appear to be emotionally mediated as search performance did not vary with political temperament when displays were inverted (Experiment 2) or when controlled processing was required for successful task performance (Experiment 3). Taken together, the present results suggest political temperament is at least partially instantiated by attentional biases for emotional material.

Emotion moderates the association between HTR2A (rs6313) genotype and antisaccade latency

“…In contrast, on gap trials, the angry face was not present to "freeze" the prosaccade response and, consequently, antisaccade responses were not speeded and thus were slower relative to overlap trials. Likewise, it has been suggested that the presence of positive stimuli serves as signals to safety and opportunity and thus facilitates or energizes ongoing motor behavior (Depue and Lenzenweger 2001;Gray 1987;Mills et al 2014). Thus, motor inhibition may have been facilitated when acting within the context of a negative stimulus (overlap trials), whereas motor execution may have been facilitated when acting within the context of a positive stimulus (overlap trials).…”

Believing Chicken Little: Evolutionary Perspectives on Credulity and Danger

“…This variation correlates with differences in political orientation, as political conservatives exhibit more overarching negativity bias, and more attention and reactivity toward threats, than do political liberals Lilienfeld & Latzman, 2014;Ahn et al, 2014;Mills, Smith, Hibbing, & Dodd, 2014;Mills et al, 2016; but see Knoll, O'Daniel, & Cusato, 2015). Correspondingly, and critical for the present purposes, conservatives tend to see the world as more dangerous than do liberals (Federico, Hunt, & Ergun, 2009).…”

Political conservatism predicts asymmetries in emotional scene memory

“…As described above, we cannot definitively rule out this account, though, we have reported evidence that it provides a less complete account of the present data. Another possibility is that rather than reflecting an attunement to generally negative or generally arousing stimuli, the relationship between political ideology and responses to emotional scenes reflects a more narrowly tuned bias to a particular subtype of negative or arousing stimuli, specifically, biological threat [20,22]. To investigate this issue, we examined memory for three subtypes of scenes within the negative scene category.…”

“…Previous work has shown that political ideology is associated with attentional asymmetries in the processing of emotionally valenced stimuli [4,22,31]. Carraro et al [4] (Experiment 1) used an emotional Stroop task and found that, relative to liberals, conservatives responded more slowly to negative words, suggesting that negative information automatically captured the attention of conservatives.…”

“…Dodd et al [8] recorded eye movements during a free-view task in which participants viewed collages of positive and negative scenes and found that speeded fixation of and prolonged dwell time on negative versus positive scenes each correlated positively with conservatism, suggesting that eye movements were selectively biased toward negative stimuli as a function of political ideology. Mills et al [22] recorded both behavioral and eye movement responses during a visual search task for happy and angry faces and found a positive correlation between anger-superiority (speeded detection of angry versus happy faces, as measured by behavioral response times) and conservatism. In contrast to Carraro et al [4] (Experiment 1), however, this speed advantage was not due to attention capture but rather to post-selectional processes.…”