Attentional bias to emotional facial expressions

It is assumed that our perceptual apparatus has been shaped by evolution. Thus, stimuli and situations that have been dangerous to the survival of the species should have some kind of priority in the way they are detected. learned or memorised. Threatening facial expressions are a class of stimuli that have been studied in this context. In a series of visual search experiments with schematic faces, subjects were asked to detect a deviant facial expression in a crowd of nine faces presented on a computer screen. The results showed a general attentional bias to detect threatening faces. Thus, an angry face among, e.g., happy faces was detected faster and with fewer errors than a happy face among angry faces. Furthermore, subjects with high and low scores on social phobia were compared. In general, no differences were obtained in detection time, but subjects in the group with high social anxiety did show more errors.