Is there selective attention to facial displays of anger?

摘要

Do angry faces pop out of crowds? Such a finding would suggest that anger is preattentively processed. The literature, however, is at best inconsistent. The present set of studies uses the visual search and Garner interference methods to assess whether there is selective attention to angry faces. Eight visual search experiments using photographs and realistic schematic faces fail to demonstrate that angry faces are preattentively processed, nor is there any good evidence that they are even preferentially processesd. Happy faces, on the other hand, are rapidly and accurately detected and show some evidence of a parallel search. Angry faces also fail to show any evidence of selective attention in the Garner task. While the visual search task provides no evidence that angry faces grab attention, it may provide evidence that they hold attention: Angry crowds take longer to search through. The results suggest that researchers should use the visual search task with caution when stimuli are complex and social in nature.