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Reduced habituation to angry faces: increased attentional capture as to override inhibition of return

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Abstract

The aim of this paper was to study whether real angry faces do capture attention to the extent of overcoming the inhibition of return (IOR) effect and whether the anxiety level of participants modulates this effect by stressing biases toward threatening stimuli. With this purpose, participants categorized the emotional valence of face targets in a standard spatial cueing procedure suitable to measure IOR. In Experiment 1, participants were selected according to their high vs. low-trait anxiety, whereas in Experiment 2 participants were induced a positive vs. anxiety mood state. The typical IOR effect was observed with neutral and happy face targets, which disappeared with angry face targets. Similar results were observed for all anxiety groups and in both experiments. The results indicate that IOR is overridden when the target is a biologically relevant angry face, as highly relevant targets should suffer less from habituation to attentional capture regardless of anxiety. We suggest that these data show that attentional capture is less likely to habituate for threatening information, so that no cost is measured in detecting new threatening information appearing at recently cued locations.

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Notes

  1. The Spanish version of the STAI includes 20 items, each scored from 0 to 3, so that the total varies from 0 to 60, rather than from 20 to 80, as in the English version. The alpha coefficients of the scale are .92 for State Anxiety and .84 for Trait Anxiety.

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Acknowledgments

This research was financially supported by research projects to A.A. and J.L. (P07.SEJ.03229, PSI2011-22416 and EUI2009-04082). We would like to thank all the participants for their contribution.

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  1. Department of Experimental Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Granada, Campus de Cartuja, S/N, 18071, Granada, Spain

    Carolina Pérez-Dueñas, Alberto Acosta & Juan Lupiáñez

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  1. Carolina Pérez-Dueñas
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Pérez-Dueñas, C., Acosta, A. & Lupiáñez, J. Reduced habituation to angry faces: increased attentional capture as to override inhibition of return. Psychological Research 78, 196–208 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-013-0493-9

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