Department of Psychiatry, Charite Campus Mitte, Berlin, Germany.
Emotion. 2012 Oct;12(5):988-96. doi: 10.1037/a0026944. Epub 2012 Feb 6.
To test whether threatening visual information receives prioritized processing, many studies have examined visual search for emotional schematic faces. Still, it has remained unclear whether negative or positive schematic faces are processed more efficiently. We used continuous flash suppression, a variant of binocular rivalry, to render single emotional schematic faces invisible and measured whether negative or positive faces have an advantage in accessing awareness. Across three experiments, positive faces were detected more quickly than negative faces. A fourth experiment indicated that this positive face advantage was unrelated to the valence of the face stimuli but due to the relative orientation of the mouth curvature and the face contour. These findings demonstrate the impact of configural stimulus properties on perceptual suppression during binocular rivalry and point to a perceptual confound present in emotional schematic faces that might account for some ambiguous results obtained with schematic face stimuli in previous studies.
为了测试威胁性视觉信息是否会优先处理，许多研究都考察了对情绪图式面孔的视觉搜索。然而，目前仍不清楚是负面还是正面的图式面孔能够更有效地被处理。我们使用连续闪光抑制，一种双眼竞争的变体，使单个情绪图式面孔不可见，并测量负面或正面的面孔是否在进入意识方面具有优势。在三个实验中，正面的面孔比负面的面孔被检测得更快。第四个实验表明，这种正面优势与面孔刺激的效价无关，而是由于嘴部曲率和面部轮廓的相对方向所致。这些发现表明，在双眼竞争期间，刺激的整体属性对感知抑制有影响，并指出了在情绪图式面孔中存在的感知混淆，这可能解释了之前使用图式面孔刺激获得的一些模棱两可的结果。
