Do fearful faces make it harder to find your way?
Seeing fearful faces before retracing a route stopped men, but not women, from improving on their second trip through a virtual building, while angry faces had no effect.
Source
The effect of negative emotion processing on spatial navigation: an experimental study using virtual reality
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — 3 emotion (neutral, fearful, angry faces) x 2 time (encoding, recall) within-subject design with gender as a between-subjects factor, run in a VR office building.
- N
- N=55 · 58 students recruited; 3 dropped out due to cybersickness, leaving 55 (24 male, 31 female).
- Population
- Italian university students aged 18-40
- Outcome
- Travel time and distance travelled to find a target object at encoding and recall
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
Students wore a VR headset and explored floors of a virtual office building to find a blue box, then did a face gender-categorisation task showing fearful, angry or neutral faces, and then had to find the same box again. Each person did this once for each emotion on a different floor, with order counterbalanced. Travel time and distance travelled were compared between the first (encoding) and second (recall) trip.
What they found
Everyone was faster and took shorter paths on the second trip, and men were generally faster than women at first. After fearful faces, however, men showed no improvement from first to second trip in either time or distance, and they were slower than women in that condition only. Women's performance was unaffected by any emotion, and angry faces did not differ from neutral ones for anyone.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The sample was small and no a priori power analysis was run, and the key finding rests on a three-way interaction with small effect sizes, so it needs replication. The study did not measure participants' own fear or anxiety, so explanations such as emotional contagion or taxed visuospatial working memory are speculation. Faces were static photos shown in a task where emotion was irrelevant, no positive emotion condition was included, and a virtual office may not capture real-world navigation.
Key terms
- Wayfinding
- Working out and travelling a route to a destination using cues from the environment and one's own movement.
- Encoding vs recall phase
- The first trip in which the route is learned, and the second trip in which the learned route must be used again.
- Emotional contagion
- The tendency to 'catch' and feel the emotion someone else is expressing.
- Three-way interaction
- When the effect of one factor depends jointly on two others, here emotion, time and gender.
- Visuospatial working memory
- A limited-capacity system for holding and manipulating visual and spatial information over short periods.
Flashcards
0 of 10 answers reviewed
Research intelligence for this paper
See its role on concept claims, tensions it is part of, placement history, and related discoveries.
Quiz yourself
What task were participants doing while viewing the emotional faces?
Common questions
Did negative emotions affect everyone's navigation?
No. Only fearful faces had an effect, and only on men, who failed to improve on their second trip.
Why might fear matter but not anger?
The authors speculate that fear signals an unknown threat in the surroundings that lingers, whereas anger signals a direct threat that ends when the face disappears; this was not tested.
Were the virtual floors equally difficult?
Yes, a check on first-trip performance found no differences between the three floors in time or distance.
More on Spatial cognition