Abstract
Face recognition usually takes place in a social context, where faces are surrounded by other stimuli. These can act as distracting flankers which impair recognition. Previous work has suggested that flankers expressing negative emotions distract more than positive ones. However, the various negative emotions differ in their relative impact and it is unclear whether all negative emotions are equally distracting. We investigated the impact of three negative (angry, fearful, sad) and one positive (happy) facial flanker conditions on target recognition in an emotion discrimination task. We examined the effect of the receiver’s gender, and the impact of two different temporal delays between flanker and target onset, as stimulus onset asynchrony is assumed to affect distractor strength. Participants identified and rated the emotional intensity of target faces surrounded by either face (emotional and neutral) or non-face flankers. Target faces were presented either simultaneously with the flankers, or delayed by 300 ms. Contrary to our hypothesis, negative flankers did not exert stronger distraction effects than positive or neutral flankers. However, happy flankers reduced recognition performance. Results of a follow-up experiment with a balanced number of emotion categories (one positive, one negative and one neutral flanker condition) suggest that the distraction effect of emotional flankers depends on the composition of the emotion categories. Additionally, congruency effects were found to be valence-specific and overruled by threat stimuli. Females responded more quickly and rated targets in happy flankers as less intense. This indicates a gender difference in emotion processing, with greater sensitivity to facial flankers in women. Targets were rated as more intense when they were presented without a temporal delay, possibly due to a stronger flanker contrast. These three experiments show that an exceptional processing of threat-related flanker stimuli depends on emotion category composition, which should be considered a mediating factor when examining emotional context effects.
Highlights
Our ability to rapidly infer someone else’s mental state by deciphering their facial expression is an essential prerequisite for successful human social interactions, which serve adaptive purposes (Ekman and Friesen, 1971; Shariff and Tracy, 2011)
Targets surrounded by scrambled flankers were rated as more intense than targets surrounded by facial flankers
Planned paired t-tests between targets surrounded by fearful flanker faces compared to all other flankers were significant for emotion recognition accuracy (t(28) = 2.18, p = 0.038) and revealed a statistical trend for reaction time (t(28) = 1.98, p = 0.058) (Figure 5)
Summary
Our ability to rapidly infer someone else’s mental state by deciphering their facial expression is an essential prerequisite for successful human social interactions, which serve adaptive purposes (Ekman and Friesen, 1971; Shariff and Tracy, 2011). Contextual stimuli communicating threat (e.g., anger or fear) seem to be advantageous in capturing attention, which might be explained by evolutionary mechanisms regarding the importance of threat detection. The latter is supported by results on the Face-in-the-Crowd (FITC) visual search task. An alternate explanation for a threat-specific superiority suggests low-level perceptual differences responsible for “pop-out” effects This assumes that angry faces draw attention due to their discontinuity with the lower face boundaries (chin, upward u-shape) compared to happy face shapes, which are more congruent with the general face boundaries (Coelho et al, 2010; Purcell and Stewart, 2010). The emotional impact might be insufficient to induce any measureable attentional shift, which makes it difficult to draw conclusions (Schmidt and Schmidt, 2013)
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