Attending to the fear in your eyes: Facilitated orienting and delayed disengagement

Abstract

Fearful facial expressions convey threat-related information and automatically elicit modulations in spatial attention. The eye-region appears to be a particularly important feature for recognising and responding to fearful faces. However, it is unknown as to whether or not fearful eyes initiate modulations in spatial attention. In the current study, three dot-probe experiments with fearful and neutral eye stimuli were performed. The results of Experiment 1 demonstrate that fearful eyes capture spatial attention through facilitated attentional orienting to threat and delayed attentional disengagement from threat. In Experiments 2 and 3, these attentional effects were replicated, while ruling out the influence of overall size/shape and brightness differences between fearful and neutral eyes, respectively. Thus, fearful eye-whites appear to be a salient feature of fearful facial expressions that elicit modulations in spatial attention.

Keywords:

• Attentional bias
• Fear face
• Eye
• Social perception
• Non-verbal communication
• Threat bias

Notes

¹ Backward masking consists of a brief initial stimulus presentation closely followed by a second “masking” stimulus, which is thought to interrupt and replace the processing of the initial stimulus.

² All reported effects vs. the neutral-neutral baseline were also significant for the combined baseline (i.e., average of fearful-fearful and neutral-neutral).

³ See note 2.

⁴ The referenced literature suggests it might be the left amygdala in particular that is common in fearful eye processing and affective attentional processing.