Attentional capture by angry faces is conditional on group membership and social status

International audiencePreferential selection of faces expressing negative emotions (e.g., fear or anger) has been repeatedly reported inthe literature and is often taken as evidence that the selection of threat-related stimuli is a fully automatic process.However, appraisal theories of emotion predict that emotional attention should rather be conditional on the appraised relevance of the emotional stimulus according tothe current concerns of individuals. In two studies, we investigated whether attentional capture by angry face cuesin a dot-probe task could be conditional on their social relevance for the observer. Rather than being fully automatic,attentional capture by angry faces appeared to be conditional to the group-membership of the faces (i.e., preferential capture by out-group angry faces), as well as to thesocial status of the observer (i.e., preferential capture byangry faces among low status individuals). These new results support the social conditionality hypothesis of emotional attention