School of Psychology, Jiangxi Normal University, Nanchang, 330022, People's Republic of China.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2022 Feb;84(2):442-449. doi: 10.3758/s13414-021-02408-9. Epub 2022 Jan 10.
Previous research on emotional bias in face perception has shown inconsistent findings, proposing either angry or happy faces to be detected more efficiently. A recent study showed that the anger superiority effect (ASE), which showed in the high attentional demand condition, vanished in the low attentional demand condition. The authors thus proposed an attentional demands modulation hypothesis to interpret the inconsistent findings. The present study tested this hypothesis in a visual crowding task in which participants were instructed to determine whether the target face was happy or angry. Attentional demands were manipulated by changing the strength of crowding, including presenting stimuli in different configurations (Experiment 1), and setting different target-flanker separations and presenting stimuli in different eccentricities (Experiment 2). Experiment 1 showed an ASE when the stimulus configuration incurred a high attentional demand. Intriguingly, the ASE became weaker and then disappeared as the attentional demand became lower. Experiment 2 replicated this finding and showed that the ASE decreased as the target-flanker separation became larger. Together, these results suggest that the emergence and magnitude of ASE is modulated by attentional demands, which supports the attentional demands modulation hypothesis.
先前有关面孔感知情绪偏差的研究得出了不一致的结论，提出愤怒或高兴的面孔被检测到的效率更高。最近的一项研究表明，在高注意力需求条件下表现出的愤怒优势效应（ASE），在低注意力需求条件下消失了。因此，作者提出了一个注意力需求调节假说来解释这些不一致的发现。本研究在视觉拥挤任务中检验了这一假说，参与者被要求判断目标面孔是高兴还是生气。通过改变拥挤的强度来操纵注意力需求，包括呈现不同配置的刺激（实验 1），以及设置不同的目标-侧翼分离并在不同的偏心位置呈现刺激（实验 2）。实验 1 显示出在刺激配置引起高注意力需求时的 ASE。有趣的是，当注意力需求降低时，ASE 变得更弱，然后消失。实验 2 复制了这一发现，并表明随着目标-侧翼分离的增加，ASE 减小。总之，这些结果表明 ASE 的出现和幅度受到注意力需求的调节，这支持了注意力需求调节假说。
