title: Task-irrelevant angry faces capture attention in visual search while modulated by resources.
abstract: We investigated the attentional capture effect of emotional faces under sufficient or restricted attentional conditions. In a modified visual search paradigm, three kinds of schematic faces (angry, happy, and neutral) served as stimuli. Participants were instructed to search for a target face indicated by a dot and to respond to the dot's position. In this design, the emotional content of the face is task-irrelevant and does not need to be attended. The results of Experiment 1 demonstrate that having an angry face as the target face elicited a faster response than did the neutral target face, and when the angry face is used as a distractor, the response to the target was delayed compared to the response with no such distractor. Experiment 2 included inverted faces to decrease emotional content; results showed that inversion of the faces reduced the effect of angry faces on the search performance. When attention was cued to a specific area in Experiment 3, the effect of angry faces outside of the cued area became weaker. In conclusion, the results indicate that a task-irrelevant angry face can capture attention beyond top-down control, but this effect is modulated by the availability of attentional resources. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved).
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Research Center for Mind, Brain, and Learning, National Chengchi University, Taiwan, ROC. slh@nccu.edu.tw
authors.forename: Shwu-Lih
authors.initials: SL
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.forename: Yu-Chieh
authors.initials: YC
authors.lastname: Chang
authors.forename: Yu-Ju
authors.initials: YJ
authors.lastname: Chen
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000786:Anger; D001288:Attention; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006240:Happiness; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D011930:Reaction Time; D055815:Young Adult