Looking at the eyes of happiness: Positive emotions mediate the influence of life satisfaction on attention to happy faces

Abstract

Despite significant advancements in the research of subjective well-being (SWB), little is known about its connection with basic cognitive processes. The present study explores the association between selective attention to emotional stimuli (i.e. emotional faces) and both the emotional and cognitive components of SWB (i.e. emotional well-being and satisfaction in life, respectively). Participants (N = 83) were asked to freely watch a series of 84 pairs of emotional (happy, angry, or sad) and neutral faces from the Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces database. Eye-tracking methodology measured first fixations, number of fixations, and the time spent looking at emotional faces. Results showed that both the emotional and cognitive components of SWB were related to a general bias to attend to happy faces and avoid sad faces. Yet, bootstrapping analyses showed that positive emotions, rather than life satisfaction, were responsible for the positive information-processing bias. We discuss the potential functionality of these biases and their implications for research on positive emotions.

Keywords:

• attention
• life satisfaction
• positive mood
• subjective well-being
• eye tracking
• cognition
• cognitive bias
• selective attention
• positive emotions

Acknowledgments

This research was partially supported by a Spanish Ministry of Economy grant to the second author (PSI2012-35500). We thank Miriam Mower for having kindly checked the final version of the manuscript.

Notes

1. Analyses showed that the three groups of selected emotional pictures did not differ in discreteness from the corresponding emotion, F(2, 81) = 1.21, ns, η² = 0.029, or in intensity, F(2, 81) = 1.39, ns, η² = 0.03. The mean scores for emotional discreteness for the happy, angry and sad expressions were 5.53 (SD = 0.39), 5.39 (SD = 0.52) and 5.32 (SD = 0.62), respectively. Mean intensity scores were 5.55 (SD = 0.51), 5.86 (SD = 0.58), and 5.76 (SD = 0.94), respectively.

2. Further bootstrapping analyses on the relationships between SWB components in predicting attention to emotional faces were performed controlling for the covariability of attention to the other types of emotional faces. Specifically, for each set of bootstrapping analyses (e.g. SWB components predicting fixation frequency to happy faces), attentional indices to the other two types of emotional faces (e.g. angry and sad faces) were entered in the models as covariates. Results were identical to those referred in the text in all cases, supporting the models in that positive emotions accounted for the influence of LS in fixation frequency and fixation time to happy faces, and not supporting the reversed models of SWB relationships in predicting attention behavior to emotional faces.