Abstract
Many existing findings indicate that processing of emotional information is pre-attentive, largely immune from attentional control. Nevertheless, inconsistent evidence on the interference of emotional cues on cognitive processing suggests that this influence may be a highly conditional phenomenon. The aim of the present study was twofold: (1) to examine the modulation of attention control on emotion processing using facial expressions (2) explore the very same effect for emotional body expressions. In Experiment 1, participants performed a Flanker task in which they had to indicate either the emotion (happy/fearful) or the gender of the target stimulus while ignoring the distracting stimuli at the side. We found evidence for intrusion of the emotional dimension of a stimulus in both the emotion and gender discrimination performance, thus when either task-relevant or task-irrelevant. To further explore the influence of attention control mechanisms, in Experiment 2 participants performed a same-or-different judgment task in which they were asked to pay attention to both the central and lateral stimuli and indicated whether the central stimulus matched the lateral for emotion or gender. Results showed that emotional features exerted an influence at an implicit level (i.e., during gender judgments) for bodies only. Gender features did not affect emotional processing in either experiments. To rule out the possibility that this effect was driven by postural rather than emotional features of fearful vs. happy stimuli, a control experiment was conducted. In Experiment 3, bodies with an opening/up-ward or closing/down-ward posture but with no emotional valence were presented. Results revealed that the body posture did not influence gender discrimination. Findings suggest that the emotional valence of a face or body stimulus can overpass attention filtering mechanisms, independently from the level of attentional modulation (Experiment 1). However, broadening the focus of attention to include the lateral stimuli led emotional information to intrude on the main task, exerting an implicit, bottom–up influence on gender processing, only when conveyed by bodies (Experiment 2). Results point to different mechanisms for the implicit processing of face and body emotional expressions, with the latter likely having role on action preparation processes.
Highlights
Adapting in a complex and dynamic environment requires the ability to remain oriented to an ongoing task and, at the same time, to direct attention to salient incoming stimuli even when they are not relevant for that task
Participants were less efficient in emotion discrimination than gender discrimination and in processing body than face stimuli
The results suggested that, despite the participants had to focus on the central target and ignore the lateral flanker, the congruency between the emotional valence of the target and flanker stimuli impacted both the emotion and gender discrimination performance (Figure 2)
Summary
Adapting in a complex and dynamic environment requires the ability to remain oriented to an ongoing task and, at the same time, to direct attention to salient incoming stimuli even when they are not relevant for that task. Stimuli charged with emotional salience have been demonstrated to elicit quicker responses in visual search paradigms using pictures of snakes/spiders among flowers/mushrooms (Ohman et al, 2001), angry/frightened faces among neutral or happy faces (Lobue, 2009; Haas et al, 2016), as well as unpleasant scenarios among neutral or pleasant scenarios (Astudillo et al, 2018) Many of these studies indicate that stimuli with a negative valence may tap attention more than positive stimuli, suggesting that emotional valence, more than stimulus relevance, is crucial for the automatic capture of attention. There is evidence stressing that the allocation of attention to emotionally salient stimuli is not automatic, but it is rather conditional to the relevance of the emotional dimension for the top–down instructions of the ongoing task (Barratt and Bundesen, 2012; Victeur et al, 2019)
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