title: Attentional capture by irrelevant emotional distractor faces.
abstract: We establish attentional capture by emotional distractor faces presented as a "singleton" in a search task in which the emotion is entirely irrelevant. Participants searched for a male (or female) target face among female (or male) faces and indicated whether the target face was tilted to the left or right. The presence (vs. absence) of an irrelevant emotional singleton expression (fearful, angry, or happy) in one of the distractor faces slowed search reaction times compared to the singleton absent or singleton target conditions. Facilitation for emotional singleton targets was found for the happy expression but not for the fearful or angry expressions. These effects were found irrespective of face gender and the failure of a singleton neutral face to capture attention among emotional faces rules out a visual odd-one-out account for the emotional capture. The present study thus establishes irrelevant, emotional, attentional capture.
authors.affiliation: Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, Division of Psychology and Language Sciences and Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London, UK.
authors.forename: Sara
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Hodsoll
authors.forename: Essi
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Viding
authors.forename: Nilli
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Lavie
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000786:Anger; D001288:Attention; D004644:Emotions; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time; D012737:Sex Factors; D055815:Young Adult