Terburg David, Stuit Sjoerd
Department of Experimental Psychology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands.
Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, South Africa.
Sci Rep. 2025 Aug 29;15(1):31923. doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-15695-1.
Threat-relevance theory suggests that gaze direction determines the self-relevance of facial threats. Indeed, angry eye-contact is a more relevant threat compared to its counterpart with averted gaze. Similarly, fearful eye-contact is not a threat to the observer, but averted fearful gaze can signal a relevant threat nearby. Following evidence that amygdala-reactivity to self-relevant threat depends on coarse visual processing, we investigate whether self-relevant threat attracts attention due to processing of low spatial frequency information via peripheral vision. Furthermore, we aim to provide behavioral relevance to this mechanism by investigating whether the psychopathic trait fearless-dominance promotes attention to self-relevant anger. Across three studies (N = 12, 31 and 36), we find that, during visual-search for emotional faces, less gaze-fixations are needed to find facial fear and anger when they are self-relevant. Self-relevance, however, does not promote peripheral identification of fear and anger in a signal-detection experiment. Together, this confirms that self-relevant facial threats indeed attract peripheral-attention. Moreover, image-analysis suggests that this is due to their low spatial-frequency content. Lastly, peripheral-attention to angry eye-contact is indeed more pronounced in relation to the psychopathic trait fearless-dominance, while diminished in relation to the psychopathic trait impulsive-antisociality, which provides preliminary behavioral relevance to this mechanism.
威胁相关性理论表明，注视方向决定了面部威胁的自我相关性。的确，与目光回避的愤怒表情相比，愤怒的眼神接触是一种更具相关性的威胁。同样，恐惧的眼神接触对观察者来说并非威胁，但目光回避的恐惧凝视可能预示附近存在相关威胁。有证据表明杏仁核对自我相关威胁的反应性取决于粗略的视觉处理，在此基础上，我们研究自我相关威胁是否因通过周边视觉处理低空间频率信息而吸引注意力。此外，我们旨在通过研究精神病态特质无畏支配是否促进对自我相关愤怒的关注，为这一机制提供行为相关性依据。在三项研究中（N分别为12、31和36），我们发现，在对情绪化面孔进行视觉搜索时，当面部恐惧和愤怒与自我相关时，找到它们所需的注视次数更少。然而，在信号检测实验中，自我相关性并未促进对恐惧和愤怒的周边识别。总之，这证实了自我相关的面部威胁确实会吸引周边注意力。此外，图像分析表明这是由于它们的低空间频率内容。最后，与精神病态特质无畏支配相关时，对愤怒眼神接触的周边注意力确实更明显，而与精神病态特质冲动反社会性相关时则减弱，这为该机制提供了初步的行为相关性依据。
