Attentional Bias to Facial Expressions of Different Emotions - A Cross-Cultural Comparison of ≠Akhoe Hai||om and German Children and Adolescents.

Cordelia Mühlenbeck,Katja Liebal,Carla Pritsch,Isabell Wartenburger,Silke Telkemeyer

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00795

Abstract

The attentional bias to negative information enables humans to quickly identify and to respond appropriately to potentially threatening situations. Because of its adaptive function, the enhanced sensitivity to negative information is expected to represent a universal trait, shared by all humans regardless of their cultural background. However, existing research focuses almost exclusively on humans from Western industrialized societies, who are not representative for the human species. Therefore, we compare humans from two distinct cultural contexts: adolescents and children from Germany, a Western industrialized society, and from the ≠Akhoe Hai||om, semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers in Namibia. We predicted that both groups show an attentional bias toward negative facial expressions as compared to neutral or positive faces. We used eye-tracking to measure their fixation duration on facial expressions depicting different emotions, including negative (fear, anger), positive (happy), and neutral faces. Both Germans and the ≠Akhoe Hai||om gazed longer at fearful faces, but shorter on angry faces, challenging the notion of a general bias toward negative emotions. For happy faces, fixation durations varied between the two groups, suggesting more flexibility in the response to positive emotions. Our findings emphasize the need for placing research on emotion perception into an evolutionary, cross-cultural comparative framework that considers the adaptive significance of specific emotions, rather than differentiating between positive and negative information, and enables systematic comparisons across participants from diverse cultural backgrounds.

Highlights

A large body of research suggests that humans pay more attention to negative than positive information (e.g., Baumeister et al, 2001; Rozin and Royzman, 2001)
Some studies showed that emotional facial expressions are not universally recognized (Jack et al, 2012; Gendron et al, 2014; Crivelli et al, 2016) and that humans attend to positive or negative information differently depending on their cultural backgrounds (Grossmann et al, 2012), such cross-cultural comparisons including several human populations from diverse cultural, social, and ecological backgrounds remain scarce
We cannot claim to identify universal behaviors based on two samples, we suggest that if we find an attentional bias toward negative information in both groups, which differ with regard to several factors, such as dwelling, subsistence, and social organization, it seems at least likely that this trait is shared by many humans regardless of their cultural backgrounds

Summary

Introduction

A large body of research suggests that humans pay more attention to negative than positive information (e.g., Baumeister et al, 2001; Rozin and Royzman, 2001). The enhanced sensitivity to negative information – resulting in increased alertness and the mobilization of attentional resources – is most likely an evolutionary adaptive behavior, as the ability to successfully detect and Attentional Bias to Facial Expressions appropriately respond to threatening and potentially harmful situations increases the probability of survival (Öhman and Mineka, 2001). Given the evolutionary significance of the fast detection of and appropriate reaction to potential threats (Öhman and Mineka, 2001), it seems likely that the attentional bias to negative emotions is a universal trait shared by all humans regardless of their cultural background. Some studies showed that emotional facial expressions are not universally recognized (Jack et al, 2012; Gendron et al, 2014; Crivelli et al, 2016) and that humans attend to positive or negative information differently depending on their cultural backgrounds (Grossmann et al, 2012), such cross-cultural comparisons including several human populations from diverse cultural, social, and ecological backgrounds remain scarce

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