Content area
Full Text
Abstract Attending versus ignoring a stimulus can later determine how it will be affectively evaluated. Here, we asked whether attentional states could also modulate subsequent sensitivity to facial expressions of emotion. In a dual-task procedure, participants first rapidly searched for a gender-defined face among two briefly displayed neutral faces. Then a test face with the previously attended or ignored face's identity was presented, and participants judged whether it was emotionally expressive (happy, angry, or fearful) or neutral. Intensity of expression in the test face was varied so that an expression detection threshold could be determined. When fearful or angry expressions were judged, expression sensitivity was worse for faces bearing the same identity as a previously ignored versus attended face. When happy expressions were judged, sensitivity was unaffected by prior attention. These data support the notion that the motivational value of stimuli may be reduced by processes associated with selective ignoring.
Keywords Face perception * Attention * Distractor devaluation * Face expression
Recently, several studies have shown that selective visual attention can influence the subsequent affective evaluation of abstract patterns (Raymond, Fenske & Tavassoli, 2003) and simple objects (Griffiths & Mitchell, 2008; Veiling, Holland & van Knippenberg, 2007) and the social appraisal of faces (Fenske, Raymond, Kessler, Westoby & Tipper, 2005; Goolsby, Shapiro, Silvert, Kiss, Fragopanagos, Taylor & Raymond, 2009; Kiss, Goolsby, Raymond, Shapiro, Silvert, Fragopanagos & Eimer, 2007). Many of the studies reporting these effects used a dual-task procedure in which participants first engaged in a simple two-item visual search task (attention task) that was immediately followed by an explicit affective evaluation of the item that had been the previously attended item (target), the previously ignored item (distractor), or neither. Typically, prior distractors have been evaluated more negatively than prior targets, and evaluation of prior targets has remained unaffected by attention. Interestingly, this distractor devaluation effect has been found to be feature based (Goolsby et al., 2009). When the attention task required selection among two same-category items (e.g., houses) on the basis of a feature (e.g., a transparent overlay color), distractor devaluation was found for items from an unrelated category (faces) if they shared the previously ignored feature (overlay color). This and other behavioral (e.g., Fenske et al., 2005; Fenske, Raymond & Kunar, 2004),...