title: 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.
authors.affiliation: a International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) , Trieste , Italy.
authors.forename: Elisabetta
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Ambron
authors.affiliation: a International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) , Trieste , Italy.
authors.forename: Raffaella I
authors.initials: RI
authors.lastname: Rumiati
authors.affiliation: a International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) , Trieste , Italy.
authors.forename: Francesco
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Foroni
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D000066499:Facial Recognition / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009043:Motor Activity / Q000502:physiology*; D012737:Sex Factors; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Distractor effect; Emotion; Gender; Reaching movements