Social processing as a top-down moderator of attentional bias towards emotional faces

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Dirk Wentura
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 468589563

Emotional facial expressions are important social signals in everyday life that warn us of imminent danger, signal opportunities to us, and allow us to interpret ambiguous situations. Thus, many studies have shown that the human cognitive system processes emotional faces in a special manner: For example, emotional expressions seem to be universal across cultures and automatically trigger physiological and motoric responses in the observer. It is a matter of debate, however, whether emotional facial expressions automatically capture visual attention. Some studies argue that an attentional bias towards emotional (especially threatening) faces occurs generally. In contrast, other studies argue that this bias occurs only in anxious individuals. Based on theories from basic attention research, we assume that the bias towards emotional faces is modulated by top-down processes according to the current task context. Consistent with this assumption, we showed in a series of experiments using variants of the cueing paradigm that participants (only) showed an attentional bias towards angry faces when the task required social processing of the target stimuli. In the first phase of the project, we found a number of confirmatory and further-reaching results. We were able to demonstrate the bias for angry faces and its dependence on a social processing mode in an EEG study (with the N2pc component as an index of spatial attention). A successful transfer was made to the perceptual load paradigm. This paradigm shows that task-irrelevant stimuli not only attract attention, but also change behavior in response to the target stimulus. However, this typically only occurs in perceptually sparse contexts, but not in perceptually complex contexts. We were able to show for the first time that, contrary to this rule, emotional faces also influence behavior in perceptually complex contexts. We were also able to demonstrate the biases in variants of visual search. However, the first project phase also raised some further questions that will be clarified in the sequel: (a) In order to interpret the perceptual load results more clearly, it must be clarified whether these are effects of spatial attention. (b) Various results from the first project phase indicate that the faces with neutral facial expressions play a special role: if attention is focused on them, there appear to be problems with attention disengagement. These processes may also have repercussions on the correct interpretation of the cueing results. (c) The results of the visual search are also subject to ambiguities of interpretation that need to be clarified.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants