Attentional bias towards angry faces is moderated by the activation of a social processing mode in the general population

ABSTRACT

Dot-probe studies usually find an attentional bias towards threatening stimuli only in anxious participants, but not in non-anxious participants. In the present study, we conducted two experiments to investigate whether attentional bias towards angry faces in unselected samples is moderated by the extent to which the current task requires social processing. In Experiment 1, participants performed a dot-probe task involving classification of either socially meaningful targets (schematic faces) or meaningless targets (scrambled schematic faces). Targets were preceded by two photographic face cues, one angry and one neutral. Angry face cues only produced significant cueing scores (i.e. faster target responses if the target replaced the angry face compared to the neutral face) with socially meaningful targets, not with meaningless targets. In Experiment 2, participants classified only meaningful targets, which were either socially meaningful (schematic faces) or not (schematic houses). Again, mean cueing scores were significantly moderated by the social character of the targets. However, cueing scores in this experiment were non-significant in the social target condition and significantly negative in the non-social target condition. These results suggest that attentional bias towards angry faces in the dot-probe task is moderated by the activation of a social processing mode in unselected samples.

KEYWORDS:

• Attentional bias
• dot-probe task
• spatial attention
• angry faces
• social processing mode

Acknowledgements

We thank Nancy Fischer and Jonas Hinze for their support in data collection and Ulrich Ecker for valuable comments on a previous version of the manuscript. Development of the MacBrain Face Stimulus Set was overseen by Nim Tottenham and supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Early Experience and Brain Development. Please contact Nim Tottenham at [email protected] for more information concerning the stimulus set.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Benedikt Emanuel Wirth http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8039-7316

Dirk Wentura http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9907-498X

Notes

1 For the sake of completeness, it should be noted that several face-in-the-crowd studies also found search advantages for happy faces (Becker, Anderson, Mortensen, Neufeld, & Neel, 2011; Juth, Lundqvist, Karlsson, & Öhman, 2005). However, it is generally possible that different emotional expressions have the potential to elicit attentional biases. We do not postulate that attentional bias occurs exclusively for angry faces.

2 We also performed analyses including stimulus gender, participant gender, and the temporal order of the experimental blocks as additional factors. However, no consistently reliable pattern of interactions regarding these additional factors occurred across the two experiments. Thus, for the sake of clarity, we refrain from reporting and discussing these findings in more detail.

3 Thus, the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the cues and targets was 100 ms. We chose this SOA because stimulus-driven shifts in covert attention peak at 100–150 ms after stimulus onset (Müller & Rabbitt, 1989). Accordingly, SOAs of 200 ms or less are often recommended to investigate covert attentional processes, as longer SOAs may tap into shifts of overt attention (Cooper & Langton, 2006; Petrova, Wentura, & Bermeitinger, 2013; Stevens, Rist, & Gerlach, 2011; Weierich, Treat, & Hollingworth, 2008).

4 Because four participants were excluded from data analysis, 35 participants completed the meaningful target block first, whereas 38 participants completed the meaningless target block first.

5 We calculated Bayesian analyses using the software package JASP (JASP Team, 2018). For our analyses, we used a scale parameter of $r={\displaystyle \frac{\sqrt{2}}{2}}$, which is the default value for the scale parameter in JASP (see Schönbrodt, Wagenmakers, Zehetleitner, & Perugini, 2017 for an explanation of scale parameters) Bayes factors were computed based on directed hypotheses (i.e., H₁ assumes that the effects are larger than zero).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation [International Research Training Group “Adaptive Minds”; GRK 1457].