Attentional Bias Toward Facial Emotion Expression : Orienting vs. Disengagement

Graduation date: 2016The present study examined involuntary attentional bias toward facial emotion expression. Particularly, the study examined two different attentional components for emotional processing, namely, orienting vs. disengagement. A cueing paradigm using two cue presentation times (250ms and 350ms) was used to determine if attention would be involuntarily captured by an irrelevant emotional facial cue. Participants were asked to search for a target emotion face (fearful vs. happy) and identify whether the box containing the target face was red or green. Cue validity effects were observed for both fearful and happy face cues only for the 350ms cue presentation time; orienting Index scores were consistent with these findings. Thus, attention toward the irrelevant emotional face cues was primarily driven by attention orienting, but only under conditions where there was sufficient time to process the emotions. Disengagement scores at the 250ms cue presentation revealed that participants had difficulty disengaging their attention from happy facial expression cues when the happy face target appeared in the opposite location of the cue. Taken together, the present findings suggest that both negativity bias and positivity bias occurred involuntarily