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Facilitated Attentional Orienting and Delayed Disengagement to Conscious and Nonconscious Fearful Faces

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Abstract

Fearful facial expressions are salient nonverbal social cues that signal the existence of potential threat within the environment. These threat signals capture spatial attention both when processed consciously (unmasked) and nonconsciously (masked). Studies using masked fearful faces have most reliably found speeded orienting towards their location, but delayed disengagement from this location has also been observed. Surprisingly however, the extent to which orienting and disengagement processes underlie modulations in spatial attention to conscious/unmasked fearful faces has yet to be explored. Here, participants performed an unmasked and masked fearful face dot-probe task, which included a baseline condition to assess attentional orienting and disengagement effects. We found that both unmasked and masked fearful faces capture spatial attention through facilitated orienting and delayed disengagement. These results provide new evidence that consciously and nonconsciously processed social expressions of fear facilitate attention through similar mechanisms.

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Notes

  1. It should be noted that this effect is very likely driven by the order of the blocks. That is, overall reaction times decreased as participants became more familiar with the task.

  2. We ran additional correlations to ensure that participants’ level of awareness did not influence orienting or disengagement scores, all p’s > .10 (Wiens, 2006).

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Acknowledgments

Research supported by Army Research Office Grant W911NF1110246 (LRMP & JMC).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Northern Michigan University, 1401 Presque Isle Avenue, Marquette, MI, 49855, USA

    Joshua M. Carlson

  2. Department of Biomedical Engineering, State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY, USA

    Lilianne R. Mujica-Parodi

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  1. Joshua M. Carlson
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  2. Lilianne R. Mujica-Parodi
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Correspondence to Joshua M. Carlson.

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Carlson, J.M., Mujica-Parodi, L.R. Facilitated Attentional Orienting and Delayed Disengagement to Conscious and Nonconscious Fearful Faces. J Nonverbal Behav 39, 69–77 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-014-0185-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-014-0185-1

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