Using facial emotional stimuli in visual search experiments: The arousal factor explains contradictory results

Abstract

For more than two decades, visual search experiments using pictures of emotional faces as stimuli have generated contradictory results. Evidence of a superior detection of angry faces compared to happy faces have been mixed with an equal amount of evidence in the opposite direction. In this article, we review this literature, and examine the hypothesis that the neglected stimulus factor of emotional arousal may explain these contradictory results. Through an extensive reanalysis of results from our own laboratory as well as from other researchers, we show that the arousal factor systematically influences the outcome of the reviewed visual search experiments, and may thus provide a key to the historical contradictions within this research field.

Keywords:

• Visual search
• Arousal
• Valence
• Stimuli
• Faces
• Emotion

We are deeply thankful to the work and benevolence of Ellen Goeleven, Rudi De Raedt, Lemke Leyman and Bruno Verschuere for both granting us access to their validation data and allowing us to publish the outcome of our reanalyses. We also thank all the authors with whom we have corresponded about stimuli and data during preparation of this manuscript. Many thanks to: Manuel Calvo, Michael Eysenck, Elaine Fox, Ranald Hansen, Gernot Horstmann, Ottmar Lipp, Amy Pinkham, Eva Gilboa-Schechtman, Nim Tottenham and Murray White.

We are deeply thankful to the work and benevolence of Ellen Goeleven, Rudi De Raedt, Lemke Leyman and Bruno Verschuere for both granting us access to their validation data and allowing us to publish the outcome of our reanalyses. We also thank all the authors with whom we have corresponded about stimuli and data during preparation of this manuscript. Many thanks to: Manuel Calvo, Michael Eysenck, Elaine Fox, Ranald Hansen, Gernot Horstmann, Ottmar Lipp, Amy Pinkham, Eva Gilboa-Schechtman, Nim Tottenham and Murray White.