When emotions guide your attention in line with a context-specific goal: Rapid utilization of visible and masked emotional faces for anticipatory attentional orienting

Abstract

The emotional value of a stimulus influences how the stimulus itself is perceived, and can "automatically" give rise to processes whose characteristics are inherently related to the emotional content of the stimuli (e.g., emotion-specific action tendencies). However, to provide optimal contextual flexibility, we propose that emotional information can be utilized in an "automatic" manner for novel, goal-directed processes that are not inherently signaled by the emotional meaning of the stimulus. We investigated this question using the endogenous cueing paradigm: Specifically, we asked how rapidly, efficiently, and to what degree of specificity emotional expressions can be utilized to anticipate the location of targets. We tested the specificity of the utilized emotional information by presenting emotional faces with contrasting affective valence (i.e., joy and anger) or pairs of negative expressions (e.g., anger and fear) as informative central cues. By presenting both masked and visible face cues, we tested whether and to what degree of specificity facial expressions can be utilized to orient attention under conditions of limited cue awareness. Cue validity effects emerged consistently in all experiments, and cuing effects built up fast, already at 300 ms cue-target asynchrony, and-at least partly-on the basis of holistic face representation. These results indicate that emotional faces can be utilized in line with a context-specific goal, with high specificity, rapidly, and even on the basis of limited perceptual input, suggesting that the utilization of emotional information can combine remarkable efficiency and situational flexibility in order to achieve optimal outcomes in various critical situations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).