Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2022 Jan 7;17(1):e0261882. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0261882. eCollection 2022.
Aggression and trait anger have been linked to attentional biases toward angry faces and attribution of hostile intent in ambiguous social situations. Memory and emotion play a crucial role in social-cognitive models of aggression but their mechanisms of influence are not fully understood. Combining a memory task and a visual search task, this study investigated the guidance of attention allocation toward naturalistic face targets during visual search by visual working memory (WM) templates in 113 participants who self-reported having served a custodial sentence. Searches were faster when angry faces were held in working memory regardless of the emotional valence of the visual search target. Higher aggression and trait anger predicted increased working memory modulated attentional bias. These results are consistent with the Social-Information Processing model, demonstrating that internal representations bias attention allocation to threat and that the bias is linked to aggression and trait anger.
攻击性和特质愤怒与对愤怒面孔的注意力偏见以及在模棱两可的社会情境中归因于敌意意图有关。记忆和情绪在攻击性的社会认知模型中起着至关重要的作用，但它们的影响机制尚不完全清楚。本研究通过 113 名曾服过徒刑的参与者的视觉工作记忆 (WM) 模板，结合记忆任务和视觉搜索任务，研究了在视觉搜索过程中自然主义面孔目标对注意力分配的引导，无论视觉搜索目标的情绪效价如何，当愤怒面孔被保留在工作记忆中时，搜索速度都会加快。较高的攻击性和特质愤怒预示着工作记忆调节的注意力偏见增加。这些结果与社会信息加工模型一致，表明内部表征会偏向于对威胁的注意力分配，而且这种偏差与攻击性和特质愤怒有关。
