Sun Yanliang, Xu Luzi, Luo Xinyu, Ren Yanju, Ding Xiaowei
School of Psychology, Shandong Normal University, No.1 University Road, Jinan, China.
Department of Psychology, Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Social Cognitive Neuroscience and Mental Health, Sun Yat-Sen University, 132 Waihuan East Road, Guangzhou, China.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2022 Jan;84(1):76-88. doi: 10.3758/s13414-021-02366-2. Epub 2021 Dec 21.
Threatening stimuli as a kind of salient information often guide attentional orienting. Besides physically threatening stimuli, social threats can also strongly bias attention, even in the absence of conscious awareness. However, the available evidence mainly came from studies on an emotional face. It is unclear whether social relation threats, such as a boss face without emotional expressions, can also direct attentional orienting unconsciously. This study aimed to reveal the extent to which the attentional system has developed to process threatening stimuli by exploring whether invisible social relation threats unconsciously biased attention. We asked graduate and undergraduate students to perform a modified Posner's cue-target task, in which the probe was preceded by a pair of competitive face cues (an advisor's face and another faculty member's face), rendered invisible through continuous flash suppression. Experiment 1a's results showed that the advisor's face reflexively oriented graduate students' spatial attention, which was significantly correlated with subjective social threat evaluation. However, Experiment 1b showed that an invisible advisor's face did not induce the same effect in undergraduate students, as they reported significantly fewer threats from their advisors than graduates. To ensure the robustness of this new effect, we preregistered a replicate study and successfully replicated the above results in Experiments 2a and 2b. Our findings provide evidence for the existence of an attentional orienting bias toward invisible social relation threats. These results suggest that the attentional system evolved to promote the exploration of our visual environment for threatening social relation signals.
威胁性刺激作为一种显著信息，常常引导注意力定向。除了身体上的威胁性刺激外，社会威胁也能强烈地使注意力产生偏差，即使在没有意识觉察的情况下也是如此。然而，现有的证据主要来自于对情绪化面孔的研究。尚不清楚诸如没有表情的老板面孔等社会关系威胁是否也能在无意识的情况下引导注意力定向。本研究旨在通过探究无形的社会关系威胁是否会在无意识中使注意力产生偏差，来揭示注意力系统在处理威胁性刺激方面的发展程度。我们让研究生和本科生进行一项修改后的波斯纳线索-目标任务，在该任务中，探测刺激之前会有一对竞争性的面孔线索（一位导师的面孔和另一位教员的面孔），通过持续闪光抑制使其不可见。实验1a的结果表明，导师的面孔会自动定向研究生的空间注意力，这与主观社会威胁评估显著相关。然而，实验1b表明，无形的导师面孔在本科生中并未产生同样的效果，因为他们报告来自导师的威胁明显少于研究生。为确保这一新效应的稳健性，我们预先注册了一项重复研究，并在实验2a和2b中成功重复了上述结果。我们的研究结果为存在针对无形社会关系威胁的注意力定向偏差提供了证据。这些结果表明，注意力系统的进化是为了促进对视觉环境中威胁性社会关系信号的探测。
