Do emotions or gender drive our actions? A study of motor distractibility

Abstract

People’s interaction with the social environment depends on the ability to attend social cues with human faces being a key vehicle of this information. This study explores whether directing the attention to gender or emotion of a face interferes with ongoing actions. In two experiments, participants reached for one of two possible targets by relying on one of two features of a face, namely, emotion (Experiment 1) or gender (Experiment 2) of a non-target stimulus (a task-relevant distractor). Participants’ reaching movements deviated toward the task-relevant distractor in both experiments. However, when attending to the gender of the face the distractor effect was modulated by both gender (task-relevant feature) and emotion (task-irrelevant feature), with the largest movement deviation being observed toward angry male faces. Endogenous allocation of attention toward faces elicits a competing motor response to the ongoing action and the emotional content of the face contributes to this process at a more automatic and implicit level.

Keywords:

• Reaching movements
• Distractor effect
• Emotion
• Gender

We would like to thank Laura Facchin for the help with data collection. We would also like to thank Robert D. McIntosh for providing us with custom programs for the kinematic analysis. Also, we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for the valuable comments and suggestions, which have provided a substantial improvement of the early version of our manuscript.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by a grant (PRIN) awarded to RIR by the Italian Ministry of University and Education.