Emotional faces in neutral crowds: Detecting displays of anger,happiness, and sadness on schematic and photographic imagesof faces

摘要

Detection of angry, happy and sad faces amongneutral backgrounds was investigated in three singleemotion tasks and an emotion comparison task usingschematic (Experiment 1) and photographic faces (Exper-iment 2). Both experiments provided evidence for thepreferential detection of anger displays over displays ofother negative or positive emotions in tasks that employedall three target emotions. Evidence for preferential detec-tion of negative emotion in general was found only withschematic faces. The present results are consistent with thenotion that the detection of displays of anger, and to someextent sadness, does not reflect on a pre-attentive mecha-nism, but is the result of a more efficient visual search thanis the detection of positive emotion.