Modulation of Attention by Faces Expressing Emotion: Evidence from Visual Marking

Abstract. Recent findings demonstrated that negative emotional faces (sad, anger or fear) tend to attract attention more than positive faces do. This study used the paradigm of visual marking to test the perspective that mentioned and explored whether the preview benefit still existed when using schematic faces as materials. The results found that preview benefit was significant in the search of affective materials. In a gap condition, it was faster to search negative faces than to search positive faces. However, this advantage did not appear in half-element condition when negative faces as distractors, which indicated that the view that negative faces capture attention more efficiently is not always like this.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ACII
• Authors: Fang Hao, Hang Zhang, Xiaolan Fu
• Keywords: ACII 2005, Negative Emotional Faces, Negative Faces, Positive Faces