Mühlenbeck Cordelia, Pritsch Carla, Wartenburger Isabell, Telkemeyer Silke, Liebal Katja
Department of Psychology, Brandenburg Medical School Theodor Fontane, Neuruppin, Germany.
Comparative Developmental Psychology, Department of Education and Psychology, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2020 Apr 28;11:795. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00795. eCollection 2020.
The attentional bias to negative information enables humans to quickly identify and to respond appropriately to potentially threatening situations. Because of its adaptive function, the enhanced sensitivity to negative information is expected to represent a universal trait, shared by all humans regardless of their cultural background. However, existing research focuses almost exclusively on humans from Western industrialized societies, who are not representative for the human species. Therefore, we compare humans from two distinct cultural contexts: adolescents and children from Germany, a Western industrialized society, and from the ≠Akhoe Hai||om, semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers in Namibia. We predicted that both groups show an attentional bias toward negative facial expressions as compared to neutral or positive faces. We used eye-tracking to measure their fixation duration on facial expressions depicting different emotions, including negative (fear, anger), positive (happy), and neutral faces. Both Germans and the ≠Akhoe Hai||om gazed longer at fearful faces, but shorter on angry faces, challenging the notion of a general bias toward negative emotions. For happy faces, fixation durations varied between the two groups, suggesting more flexibility in the response to positive emotions. Our findings emphasize the need for placing research on emotion perception into an evolutionary, cross-cultural comparative framework that considers the adaptive significance of specific emotions, rather than differentiating between positive and negative information, and enables systematic comparisons across participants from diverse cultural backgrounds.
对负面信息的注意偏向使人类能够快速识别潜在威胁情况并做出适当反应。由于其适应性功能，对负面信息的增强敏感性被认为是一种普遍特征，所有人类无论文化背景如何都具备。然而，现有研究几乎完全集中在西方工业化社会的人群，而他们并不能代表整个人类物种。因此，我们比较了来自两种不同文化背景的人群：来自西方工业化社会德国的青少年和儿童，以及来自纳米比亚半游牧狩猎采集部落≠Akhoe Hai||om的人群。我们预测，与中性或正面面孔相比，两组人群都会对负面面部表情表现出注意偏向。我们使用眼动追踪技术来测量他们对描绘不同情绪的面部表情的注视持续时间，包括负面表情（恐惧、愤怒）、正面表情（高兴）和中性表情。德国人和≠Akhoe Hai||om人群对恐惧面孔的注视时间都更长，但对愤怒面孔的注视时间更短，这对普遍存在对负面情绪偏向的观点提出了挑战。对于高兴面孔，两组人群的注视持续时间有所不同，这表明在对正面情绪的反应上更具灵活性。我们的研究结果强调，有必要将情绪感知研究置于一个进化的、跨文化比较框架中，该框架要考虑特定情绪的适应性意义，而不是区分正面和负面信息，并能够对来自不同文化背景的参与者进行系统比较。
