title: Electrophysiological evidence for attentional capture by irrelevant angry facial expressions: Naturalistic faces.
abstract: Recently, research on lateralized event related potentials (ERPs) in response to irrelevant distractors has revealed that angry but not happy schematic distractors capture spatial attention. Whether this effect occurs in the context of the natural expression of emotions is unknown. To fill this gap, observers were asked to judge the gender of a natural face surrounded by a color singleton among five other face identities. In contrast to previous studies, the similarity between the task-relevant feature (color) and the distractor features was low. On some trials, the target was displayed concurrently with an irrelevant angry or happy face. The lateralized ERPs to these distractors were measured as a marker of spatial attention. Our results revealed that angry face distractors, but not happy face distractors, triggered a PD, which is a marker of distractor suppression. Subsequent to the PD, angry distractors elicited a larger N450 component, which is associated with conflict detection. We conclude that threatening expressions have a high attentional priority because of their emotional value, resulting in early suppression and late conflict detection.
authors.affiliation: Faculté de Psychologie et des Sciences de l'Education, Université de Genève, Switzerland. Electronic address: Nicolas.Burra@unige.ch.
authors.forename: Nicolas
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Burra
authors.affiliation: Faculté de Psychologie et des Sciences de l'Education, Université de Genève, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Sélim Yahia
authors.initials: SY
authors.lastname: Coll
authors.affiliation: Faculté de Psychologie et des Sciences de l'Education, Université de Genève, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Caroline
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Barras
authors.affiliation: Faculté de Psychologie et des Sciences de l'Education, Université de Genève, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Dirk
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Kerzel
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000786:Anger / Q000502:physiology*; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D005145:Face; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006240:Happiness; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Angry faces; Attentional capture; N450; P(D)