No experimental evidence for emotion-specific gaze cueing in a threat context

ABSTRACT

We examined the utility of a gaze cueing paradigm to examine sensitivity to differences among negatively valenced expressions. Participants judged target stimuli (dangerous or safe), the location of which was cued by the gaze direction of a central face. Dawel et al. reported that gaze cueing effects (faster response times on valid vs. invalid trials) were larger when the central face displayed fear than when it displayed happiness. Our aim was to determine whether this effect was specific to fear, to all threat-related expressions (fear, anger), or to all negatively valenced expressions (fear, anger, sadness, disgust) with the aim of using this protocol to study the development of implicit discrimination of negatively valenced expressions. Across five experiments in which we varied the number of models (1 vs. 4), the number of expressions (2 vs. 5), and the country of residence of participants (Canada vs. Australia) we found no evidence that the magnitude of gaze cueing effects is modulated by expression. We discuss our failure to replicate in the context of the broader literature.

KEYWORDS:

• Gaze cueing
• facial emotion recognition
• threat
• replication crisis

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available at the following URL: https://osf.io/36xma.

Acknowledgments

We thank Kathryn Bunda, Jo Butler, Charlotte Casey, Harmonie Chan, Kariann Gracey, Trudy McCaul, Kristina Mitterovo and Gabriela Salgado for helping with stimulus creation and data collection. We thank Dawel et al. (2015) for sharing their original protocol. We also thank Tom Nelson and Tyler Kennedy Collins for programming experiments 1–3.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a SSHRC Insight grant awarded to CJM.