Elam Kit K, Carlson Joshua M, Dilalla Lisabeth F, Reinke Karen S
Centre for Research on Children and Families, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand.
Evol Psychol. 2010 Dec 9;8(4):754-67. doi: 10.1177/147470491000800415.
Emotional facial expressions are important social cues that convey salient affective information. Infants, younger children, and adults all appear to orient spatial attention to emotional faces with a particularly strong bias to fearful faces. Yet in young children it is unclear whether or not both happy and fearful faces extract attention. Given that the processing of emotional faces is believed by some to serve an evolutionarily adaptive purpose, attentional biases to both fearful and happy expressions would be expected in younger children. However, the extent to which this ability is present in young children and whether or not this ability is genetically mediated is untested. Therefore, the aims of the current study were to assess the spatial-attentional properties of emotional faces in young children, with a preliminary test of whether this effect was influenced by genetics. Five-year-old twin pairs performed a dot-probe task. The results suggest that children preferentially direct spatial attention to emotional faces, particularly right visual field faces. The results provide support for the notion that the direction of spatial attention to emotional faces serves an evolutionarily adaptive function and may be mediated by genetic mechanisms.
情绪性面部表情是传达显著情感信息的重要社交线索。婴儿、幼儿和成年人似乎都会将空间注意力导向情绪性面孔，尤其对恐惧面孔有特别强烈的偏向。然而，在幼儿中，尚不清楚快乐面孔和恐惧面孔是否都会吸引注意力。鉴于一些人认为情绪性面孔的加工具有进化适应性目的，预计幼儿对恐惧和快乐表情都会存在注意力偏向。然而，这种能力在幼儿中的存在程度以及这种能力是否由基因介导尚未得到检验。因此，本研究的目的是评估幼儿情绪性面孔的空间注意特性，并初步测试这种效应是否受基因影响。五岁的双胞胎对进行了点探测任务。结果表明，儿童优先将空间注意力导向情绪性面孔，尤其是右视野面孔。这些结果支持了这样一种观点，即对情绪性面孔的空间注意力导向具有进化适应性功能，并且可能由遗传机制介导。
