Emotion
Do fearful faces slow our actions only when emotion matters?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
People were slower and made more errors when a fearful face, rather than a happy one, told them to move, but only when they were judging emotion; when judging gender the difference disappeared.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Within-subject: the same fearful, happy and neutral faces served as go/no-go cues in an emotion-discrimination task (move to emotional faces) and a gender-discrimination task (move by face gender), order counterbalanced.
- N
- N=40 · 40 right-handed adults (20 men) completed both tasks.
- Population
- Healthy right-handed young adults in Rome
- Outcome
- Reaching reaction time and error rate on go trials cued by fearful versus happy faces
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Key findings
When emotion was task-relevant, reaching started 15.3 ms later on average after fearful faces than after happy faces, a large effect, and more errors occurred after fearful faces. In the gender task, fearful and happy faces produced no reliable difference in speed or errors. The author interprets this as fearful faces capturing and holding attention and interfering with action planning, but only when their emotional meaning is attended.
Methodology
Forty adults did a touchscreen reaching task in which a face photo signalled whether to reach to a target (go) or hold still (no-go). In one task they reached for fearful or happy faces and held still for neutral ones, so emotion was relevant; in the other task, using the same faces, they reached based on whether the face was male or female, so emotion was irrelevant. Fearful and happy faces were checked to be equally arousing.
Limitations
The sample was small, young and healthy, and only four actors and two emotions (fear and happiness) were used, so it is unclear whether anger or other expressions behave the same. Eye movements were not recorded, so the claim that people inspect faces differently across tasks, and the attention-capture explanation, are untested. The absolute effect is a few milliseconds in a highly controlled lab task, and the author notes the finding needs replication.
How this study connects
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