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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Aronoff, J., Barclay, A.M., Stevenson, L.A.: The recognition of threatening facial stimuli. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology 54, 647–655 (1988)
Dolan, R.J.: Emotion, cognition and behavior. Science 298, 1191–1194 (2002)
Eastwood, J.D., Smilek, D., Merikle, P.M.: Negative facial expression captures attention and disrupts performance. Perception & Psychophysics 65, 352–358 (2003)
Eastwood, J., Smilek, D., Merikle, P.M.: Differential attentional guidance by unattended faces expressing positive and negative emotion. Perception & Pshchophysics 63, 1004–1013 (2001)
Farah, M.J., Wilson, K.D., Drain, M., Tanaka, J.N.: What is “special” about face perception? Psychological Review 105, 482–498 (1998)
Fenske, M.J., Eastwood, J.D.: Modulation of focused attention by faces expressing emotion: evidence from flanker tasks. Emotion 3, 327–343 (2003)
Gibson, B.S., Jiang, Y.: Visual marking and the perception of salience in visual search. Perception & Psychophysics 63, 59–73 (2001)
Hansen, C.N., Hansen, R.D.: Finding the face in the crowd: an anger superiority effect. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology 54, 917–924 (1988)
Kunar, M.A., Humphreys, G.W., Smith, K.J., et al.: When a re-appearance is old news: visual marking survives occlusion. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 29, 185–198 (2003)
Lipp, O.V., Derakshan, N., Waters, A.M., Logies, S.: Snakes and cats in the flower bed: fast detection is not specific to pictures of fear-relevant animals. Emotion 4, 233–250 (2004)
Ohman, A., Lundqvist, D., Esteves, F.: The face in the crowd revisited: A threat advantage with schematic stimuli. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology 80, 381–396 (2001)
Olivers, C.N.L., Humphreys, G.W.: Visual marking inhibits singleton capture. Cognitive Psychology 47, 1–42 (2003)
Olivers, C.N.L., Humphreys, G.W.: When visual marking meets the attentional blink: more evidence for top-down, limited-capacity inhibition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 28, 22–42 (2002)
Smilek, D., Eastwood, J.D., Merikle, P.: Does unattended information facilitate change detection? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance 26, 480–487 (2000)
Treisman, A., Souther, J.: Search asymmetry: a diagnostic for preattentive processing of separable features. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 114, 285–310 (1985)
Watson, D.G., Humphreys, G.W.: Visual marking and visual change. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 28, 379–395 (2002)
Watson, D.G., Humphreys, G.W.: Visual marking: prioritizing selection for new objects by top-down attentional inhibition of old objects. Psychological Review 104, 90–122 (1997)
White, M.: Preattentive analysis of facial expressions of emotion. Cognition & Emotion 9, 439–460 (1995)
Wolfe, J.: Asymmetries in visual search: an introduction. Perception & Psychophysics 63, 381–389 (2001)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Hao, F., Zhang, H., Fu, X. (2005). Modulation of Attention by Faces Expressing Emotion: Evidence from Visual Marking. In: Tao, J., Tan, T., Picard, R.W. (eds) Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction. ACII 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3784. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11573548_17
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11573548_17
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-29621-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-32273-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)