Social processing as a top-down moderator of attentional bias towards emotional faces

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Dirk Wentura, since 1/2023
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 468589563

Emotional facial expressions are important social signals in everyday life that warn us of imminent danger, signal opportunities to us, and allow us to interpret ambiguous situations. Thus, many studies have shown that the human cognitive system processes emotional faces in a special manner: For example, emotional expressions seem to be universal across cultures and automatically trigger physiological and motoric responses in the observer. It is a matter of debate, however, whether emotional facial expressions automatically capture visual attention. Some studies argue that an attentional bias towards emotional (especially threatening) faces occurs generally. In contrast, other studies argue that this bias occurs only in anxious individuals. Based on theories from basic attention research, we assume that the bias towards emotional faces is modulated by top-down processes according to the current task context. Consistent with this assumption, we showed in a series of experiments using variants of the cueing paradigm that participants (only) showed an attentional bias towards angry faces when the task required social processing of the target stimuli. Based on this finding, we concluded that the occurrence of an attentional bias towards angry faces is contingent on the activation of a social processing mode. The aim of the planned project is to corroborate, to elaborate on, and to specify this social-processing hypothesis. In a series of experiments, we aim to investigate, which basic attentional processes are affected by the activation of a social processing mode. Does the social processing mode lead to a preferred initial allocation of attention towards emotional faces? Or does the social processing mode cause a delayed disengagement of attention from emotional faces? Does the social processing mode – apart from biases in spatial attention – also affect biases in temporal attention towards emotional faces? Furthermore, we aim to investigate whether the social processing mode affects attentional biases towards different emotional expressions in a similar manner. In order to shed light on the exact nature of the social processing mode, we aim to investigate in which ways the social processing mode can be activated. Are participants required to search for stimuli that are defined by a socially relevant feature? Or is it sufficient to make social information salient in other ways during the assessment of the attentional bias? Thus, findings of the planned project have the potential to make valuable contributions to the reconciliation of seemingly inconsistent results of previous studies regarding the occurrence of attentional bias towards emotional faces.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Dr. Benedikt Wirth, until 12/2022