Li Jie, Oksama Lauri, Nummenmaa Lauri, Hyönä Jukka
a Section of Applied Psychology , Beijing Sport University , Beijing , People's Republic of China.
b Department of Behavioral Sciences , National Defence University , Helsinki , Finland.
Cogn Emot. 2018 May;32(3):464-479. doi: 10.1080/02699931.2017.1315929. Epub 2017 Apr 12.
We investigated whether and how emotional facial expressions affect sustained attention in face tracking. In a multiple-identity and object tracking paradigm, participants tracked multiple target faces that continuously moved around together with several distractor faces, and subsequently reported where each target face had moved to. The emotional expression (angry, happy, and neutral) of the target and distractor faces was manipulated. Tracking performance was better when the target faces were angry rather than neutral, whereas angry distractor faces did not affect tracking. The effect persisted when the angry faces were presented upside-down and when surface features of the faces were irrelevant to the ongoing task. There was only suggestive and weak evidence for a facilitatory effect of happy targets and a distraction effect of happy distractors in comparison to neutral faces. The results show that angry expressions on the target faces can facilitate sustained attention on the targets via increased vigilance, yet this effect likely depends on both emotional information and visual features of the angry faces.
我们研究了情绪化的面部表情是否以及如何影响面部追踪中的持续注意力。在一个多身份和物体追踪范式中，参与者追踪多个目标面孔，这些目标面孔与几个干扰面孔一起持续移动，随后报告每个目标面孔移动到了哪里。对目标面孔和干扰面孔的情绪表达（愤怒、高兴和中性）进行了操控。当目标面孔是愤怒表情而非中性表情时，追踪表现更好，而愤怒的干扰面孔并不影响追踪。当愤怒面孔倒置呈现以及面孔的表面特征与正在进行的任务无关时，这种效应依然存在。与中性面孔相比，仅有暗示性且微弱的证据表明高兴的目标面孔有促进作用，高兴的干扰面孔有干扰作用。结果表明，目标面孔上的愤怒表情可通过提高警觉性来促进对目标的持续注意力，但这种效应可能既取决于愤怒面孔的情绪信息，也取决于其视觉特征。
