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Differential effects of emotional expressions and scenes on visual search

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Abstract

Although research has shown that emotional content modulates attention, such studies often differ in the types of stimuli used to evoke emotions. Some studies utilize emotionally valenced scenes and others utilize emotional facial expressions. Importantly, the comparability of the effect of these two stimulus classes on attention is unclear. In the present experiments, we contrasted the effects of emotional scenes and facial expressions with the same valence on visual search speed. Overall, scenes caused greater disruption in visual search than faces, and emotional content appeared to modulate this effect with larger differences between scenes and faces arising for more negatively valenced stimuli. This pattern of findings was largely replicated after varying task difficulty in Study 2 and the visual properties of the search array and task difficulty in Study 3. These findings indicate that emotional scenes and faces produce differential effects on attention, and suggest that negative emotional scenes are particularly potent in disrupting the allocation of attention.

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Notes

  1. These scenes were roughly matched for brightness and clarity. An independent sample of healthy controls (n = 20) rated each Anger (M = 51.71, SD = 27.96), Disgust (M = 42.50, SD = 23.34), Fear (M = 48.73, SD = 24.18), Happy (M = 39.53, SD = 20.69) and Neutral (M = 2.62, SD = 3.73) scene on arousal (0 = none to 100 = extremely/most imaginable). Emotional scenes (anger, fear, disgust, and happy) were found to be statistically higher on arousal when compared to neutral scenes (p’s < .05). Furthermore, the emotional scenes (anger, fear, disgust, and happy) did not statistically differ from each other on arousal (p’s > .05). Participants also completed a forced-choice task that required them to place each scene in one of five emotional categories: anger, fear, disgust, happy or neutral. Scenes where assigned to their predetermined emotional category the majority of the time: anger (65 %), fear (72 %), disgust (91 %), happy (93 %) or neutral (96 %). However, participants were more likely to mislabel anger scenes than other scenes.

  2. Scenes were presented for only 500 ms before the visual search task because time (100, 500 ms) was not found to significantly interact with stimulus (scene, face) or emotion (anger, disgust, fear, happy, neutral) in Study 1.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank David Zald for comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript.

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  1. Vanderbilt University, 301 Wilson Hall, 111 21st Avenue South, Nashville, TN, 37203, USA

    Bunmi O. Olatunji, Thomas Armstrong & Bethany G. Ciesielski

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  1. Bunmi O. Olatunji
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Correspondence to Bunmi O. Olatunji.

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Olatunji, B.O., Armstrong, T. & Ciesielski, B.G. Differential effects of emotional expressions and scenes on visual search. Motiv Emot 39, 589–601 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-015-9477-y

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