Gaze behavior predicts memory bias for angry facial expressions in stable dysphoria

Interpersonal theories suggest that depressed individuals are sensitive to signs of interpersonal rejection, such as angry facial expressions. The present study examined memory bias for happy, sad, angry, and neutral facial expressions in stably dysphoric and stably nondysphoric young adults. Participants' gaze behavior (i.e., fixation duration, number of fixations, and distance between fixations) while viewing these facial expressions was also assessed. Using signal detection analyses, the dysphoric group had better accuracy on a surprise recognition task for angry faces than the nondysphoric group. Further, mediation analyses indicated that greater breadth of attentional focus (i.e., distance between fixations) accounted for enhanced recall of angry faces among the dysphoric group. There were no differences between dysphoria groups in gaze behavior or memory for sad, happy, or neutral facial expressions. Findings from this study identify a specific cognitive mechanism (i.e., breadth of attentional focus) that accounts for biased recall of angry facial expressions in dysphoria. This work also highlights the potential for integrating cognitive and interpersonal theories of depression.     

The Relationship Between Attention,Interpretation, and Memory Bias During Facial Perception in Social Anxiety

Although cognitive theories suggest the interactive nature of information processing biases in contributing to social anxiety, most studies to date have investigated these biases in isolation. This study aimed at (a) testing the association between social anxiety and each of the threat-related cognitive biases: attention, interpretation, and memory bias; and (b) examining the relationship between these cognitive biases in facial perception. We recruited an unselected sample of 188 adult participants and measured their level of social anxiety and cognitive biases using faces displaying angry, disgusted, happy, and ambiguous versions of these expressions. All bias tasks were assessed with the same set of facial stimuli. Regression analyses showed that social anxiety symptoms significantly predicted attention avoidance and poorer sensitivity in recognizing threatening faces. Social anxiety was, however, unrelated to interpretation bias in our sample. Results of path analysis suggested that attention bias influenced memory bias indirectly through interpretation bias for angry but not disgusted faces. Our findings suggest that, regardless of social anxiety level, when individuals selectively oriented to faces displaying anger, the faces were interpreted to be more negative. This, in turn, predicted better memory for the angry faces. The results provided further empirical support for the combined cognitive bias hypothesis.     

Eye gaze influences working memory for happy but not angry faces

Previous research has shown that angry and happy faces are perceived as less emotionally intense when shown with averted versus direct gaze. Other work reports that long-term memory (LTM) for angry (but not happy) faces was poorer when they were encoded with averted versus direct gaze, suggesting that threat signals are diluted when eye contact is not engaged. The current study examined whether gaze modulates working memory (WM) for angry and happy faces. In stark contrast to LTM effects, WM for angry faces was not significantly modulated by gaze direction. However, WM for happy faces was significantly enhanced when gaze was averted versus direct. These findings suggest that in WM – when rapid processing and an immediate response is required – averted gaze may alter the meaning behind a smile, and make this kind of expression particularly salient for short-term processing.     

The effects of happy and angry expressions on identity and expression memory for unfamiliar faces

We investigated the influence of happy and angry expressions on memory for new faces. Participants were presented with happy and angry faces in an intentional or incidental learning condition and were later asked to recognise the same faces displaying a neutral expression. They also had to remember what the initial expressions of the faces had been. Remember/know/guess judgements were made both for identity and expression memory. Results showed that faces were better recognised when presented with a happy rather than an angry expression, but only when learning was intentional. This was mainly due to an increase of the "remember" responses for happy faces when encoding was intentional rather than incidental. In contrast, memory for emotional expressions was not different for happy and angry faces whatever the encoding conditions. We interpret these findings according to the social meaning of emotional expressions for the self.     

Applying the attractor field model to social cognition: Perceptual discrimination is facilitated, but memory is impaired for faces displaying evaluatively congruent expressions

A new model of mental representation is applied to social cognition: the attractor field model. Using the model, the authors predicted and found a perceptual advantage but a memory disadvantage for faces displaying evaluatively congruent expressions. In Experiment 1, participants completed a same/different perceptual discrimination task involving morphed pairs of angry-to-happy Black and White faces. Pairs of faces displaying evaluatively incongruent expressions (i.e., happy Black, angry White) were more likely to be labeled as similar and were less likely to be accurately discriminated from one another than faces displaying evaluatively congruent expressions (i.e., angry Black, happy White). Experiment 2 replicated this finding and showed that objective discriminability of stimuli moderated the impact of attractor field effects on perceptual discrimination accuracy. In Experiment 3, participants completed a recognition task for angry and happy Black and White faces. Consistent with the attractor field model, memory accuracy was better for faces displaying evaluatively incongruent expressions. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Short-term memory for emotional faces in dysphoria

The study aimed to determine if the memory bias for negative faces previously demonstrated in depression and dysphoria generalises from long- to short-term memory. A total of 29 dysphoric (DP) and 22 non-dysphoric (ND) participants were presented with a series of faces and asked to identify the emotion portrayed (happiness, sadness, anger, or neutral affect). Following a delay, four faces were presented (the original plus three distractors) and participants were asked to identify the target face. Half of the trials assessed memory for facial emotion, and the remaining trials examined memory for facial identity. At encoding, no group differences were apparent. At memory testing, relative to ND participants, DP participants exhibited impaired memory for all types of facial emotion and for facial identity when the faces featured happiness, anger, or neutral affect, but not sadness. DP participants exhibited impaired identity memory for happy faces relative to angry, sad, and neutral, whereas ND participants exhibited enhanced facial identity memory when faces were angry. In general, memory for faces was not related to performance at encoding. However, in DP participants only, memory for sad faces was related to sadness recognition at encoding. The results suggest that the negative memory bias for faces in dysphoria does not generalise from long- to short-term memory.     

Memory-based attentional biases: Anxiety is linked to threat avoidance

The purpose of the present research was to examine if anxiety is linked to a memory-based attentional bias, in which attention to threat is thought to depend on implicit learning. Memory-based attentional biases were defined and also demonstrated in two experiments. A total of 168 university students were shown a pair of faces that varied in their emotional $ content (angry, neutral, and happy), with each type of emotion being consistently preceded by a particular neutral cue face, appearing in the same position. Eye movements were measured during these cue faces and during the emotional faces. The results of two experiments indicated that anxiety was connected with a tendency to avert one's gaze from the positions of angry faces to the positions of happy faces, before these were shown on the screen. This, in turn, caused a reduced perception of angry relative to happy faces. In Experiment 2, participants were also not aware of having a memory-based attentional bias.     

The effect of facial expression and gaze direction on memory for unfamiliar faces

We report data from an experiment that investigated the influence of gaze direction and facial expression on face memory. Participants were shown a set of unfamiliar faces with either happy or angry facial expressions, which were either gazing straight ahead or had their gaze averted to one side. Memory for faces that were initially shown with angry expressions was found to be poorer when these faces had averted as opposed to direct gaze, whereas memory for individuals shown with happy faces was unaffected by gaze direction. We suggest that memory for another individual's face partly depends on an evaluation of the behavioural intention of that individual.     

The effect of facial expression and gaze direction on memory for unfamiliar faces

We report data from an experiment that investigated the influence of gaze direction and facial expression on face memory. Participants were shown a set of unfamiliar faces with either happy or angry facial expressions, which were either gazing straight ahead or had their gaze averted to one side. Memory for faces that were initially shown with angry expressions was found to be poorer when these faces had averted as opposed to direct gaze, whereas memory for individuals shown with happy faces was unaffected by gaze direction. We suggest that memory for another individual's face partly depends on an evaluation of the behavioural intention of that individual.     

The influence of indirect and direct emotional processing on memory for facial expressions

We used the remember-know procedure (Tulving, 1985 ) to test the behavioural expression of memory following indirect and direct forms of emotional processing at encoding. Participants (N=32) viewed a series of facial expressions (happy, fearful, angry, and neutral) while performing tasks involving either indirect (gender discrimination) or direct (emotion discrimination) emotion processing. After a delay, participants completed a surprise recognition memory test. Our results revealed that indirect encoding of emotion produced enhanced memory for fearful faces whereas direct encoding of emotion produced enhanced memory for angry faces. In contrast, happy faces were better remembered than neutral faces after both indirect and direct encoding tasks. These findings suggest that fearful and angry faces benefit from a recollective advantage when they are encoded in a way that is consistent with the predictive nature of their threat. We propose that the broad memory advantage for happy faces may reflect a form of cognitive flexibility that is specific to positive emotions.     

Binocular rivalry: a window into emotional processing in aging

Previous binocular rivalry studies with younger adults have shown that emotional stimuli dominate perception over neutral stimuli. Here we investigated the effects of age on patterns of emotional dominance during binocular rivalry. Participants performed a face/house rivalry task where the emotion of the face (happy, angry, neutral) and orientation (upright, inverted) of the face and house stimuli were varied systematically. Age differences were found with younger adults showing a general emotionality effect (happy and angry faces were more dominant than neutral faces) and older adults showing inhibition of anger (neutral faces were more dominant than angry faces) and positivity effects (happy faces were more dominant than both angry and neutral faces). Age differences in dominance patterns were reflected by slower rivalry rates for both happy and angry compared to neutral face/house pairs in younger adults, and slower rivalry rates for happy compared to both angry and neutral face/house pairs in older adults. Importantly, these patterns of emotional dominance and slower rivalry rates for emotional-face/house pairs disappeared when the stimuli were inverted. This suggests that emotional valence, and not low-level image features, were responsible for the emotional bias in both age groups. Given that binocular rivalry has a limited role for voluntary control, the findings imply that anger suppression and positivity effects in older adults may extend to more automatic tasks.     

Understanding associations between negatively biased attention and depression and social anxiety: positively biased attention is key

ABSTRACT

Background and objectives: Although research supports the premise that depressed and socially anxious individuals direct attention preferentially toward negative emotional cues, little is known about how attention to positive emotional cues might modulate this negative attention bias risk process. The purpose of this study was to determine if associations between attention biases to sad and angry faces and depression and social anxiety symptoms, respectively, would be strongest in individuals who also show biased attention away from happy faces.

Methods: Young adults (N?=?151; 79% female; M?=?19.63 years) completed self-report measures of depression and social anxiety symptoms and a dot probe task to assess attention biases to happy, sad, and angry facial expressions.

Results: Attention bias to happy faces moderated associations between attention to negatively valenced faces and psychopathology symptoms. However, attention bias toward sad faces was positively and significantly related to depression symptoms only for individuals who also selectively attended toward happy faces. Similarly, attention bias toward angry faces was positively and significantly associated with social anxiety symptoms only for individuals who also selectively attended toward happy faces.

Conclusions: These findings suggest that individuals with high levels of depression or social anxiety symptoms attend preferentially to emotional stimuli across valences.     

More than just another face in the crowd: superior detection of threatening facial expressions in children and adults

Threatening facial expressions can signal the approach of someone or something potentially dangerous. Past research has established that adults have an attentional bias for angry faces, visually detecting their presence more quickly than happy or neutral faces. Two new findings are reported here. First, evidence is presented that young children share this attentional bias. In five experiments, young children and adults were asked to find a picture of a target face among an array of eight distracter faces. Both age groups detected threat‐relevant faces – angry and frightened – more rapidly than non‐threat‐relevant faces (happy and sad). Second, evidence is presented that both adults and children have an attentional bias for negative stimuli overall. All negative faces were detected more quickly than positive ones in both age groups. As the first evidence that young children exhibit the same superior detection of threatening facial expressions as adults, this research provides important support for the existence of an evolved attentional bias for threatening stimuli.     

Temporal processing of emotional stimuli: the capture and release of attention by angry faces

Neuroimaging data suggest that emotional information, especially threatening faces, automatically captures attention and receives rapid processing. While this is consistent with the majority of behavioral data, behavioral studies of the attentional blink (AB) additionally reveal that aversive emotional first target (T1) stimuli are associated with prolonged attentional engagement or "dwell" time. One explanation for this difference is that few AB studies have utilized manipulations of facial emotion as the T1. To address this, schematic faces varying in expression (neutral, angry, happy) served as the T1 in the current research. Results revealed that the blink associated with an angry T1 face was, primarily, of greater magnitude than that associated with either a neutral or happy T1 face, and also that initial recovery from this processing bias was faster following angry, compared with happy, T1 faces. The current data therefore provide important information regarding the time-course of attentional capture by angry faces: Angry faces are associated with both the rapid capture and rapid release of attention.     

Happy to See Me,Aren’t You,Sally? Signal Detection Analysis of Emotion Detection in Briefly Presented Male and Female Faces

Using signal detection methods, possible effects of emotion type (happy, angry), gender of the stimulus face, and gender of the participant on the detection and response bias of emotion in briefly presented faces were investigated. Fifty-seven participants (28 men, 29 women) viewed 90 briefly presented faces (30 happy, 30 angry, and 30 neutral, each with 15 male and 15 female faces) answering yes if the face was perceived as emotional and no if it was not perceived as emotional. Sensitivity [d', z(hit rate) minus z(false alarm rate)] and response bias (β, likelihood ratio of "signal plus noise" vs. "noise") were measured for each face combination for each presentation time (6.25, 12.50, 18.75, 25.00, 31.25 ms). The d' values were higher for happy than for angry faces and higher for angry-male than for angry-female faces, and there were no effects of gender-of-participant. Results also suggest a greater tendency for participants to judge happy-female faces as emotional, as shown by lower β values for these faces as compared to the other emotion-gender combinations. This happy-female response bias suggests, at least, a partial explanation to happy-superiority effects in studies where performance is only measured as percent correct responses, and, in general, that women are expected to be happy.     

Individuation training with other‐race faces reduces preschoolers’ implicit racial bias: a link between perceptual and social representation of faces in children

The present study examined whether perceptual individuation training with other‐race faces could reduce preschool children's implicit racial bias. We used an ‘angry = outgroup’ paradigm to measure Chinese children's implicit racial bias against African individuals before and after training. In Experiment 1, children between 4 and 6 years were presented with angry or happy racially ambiguous faces that were morphed between Chinese and African faces. Initially, Chinese children demonstrated implicit racial bias: they categorized happy racially ambiguous faces as own‐race (Chinese) and angry racially ambiguous faces as other‐race (African). Then, the children participated in a training session where they learned to individuate African faces. Children's implicit racial bias was significantly reduced after training relative to that before training. Experiment 2 used the same procedure as Experiment 1, except that Chinese children were trained with own‐race Chinese faces. These children did not display a significant reduction in implicit racial bias. Our results demonstrate that early implicit racial bias can be reduced by presenting children with other‐race face individuation training, and support a linkage between perceptual and social representations of face information in children.     

Attentional Biases for Facial Expressions in Social Phobia: The Face-in-the-Crowd Paradigm

The present study examines the attentional bias hypothesis for individuals with generalised social phobia (GSPs). Socially phobic individuals were hypothesised to exhibit attentional bias towards threat stimuli relevant to interpersonal situations. This hypothesis was tested using the face-in-the-crowd paradigm. GSPs and nonanxious controls (NACs) detected an angry, happy, neutral, or disgust target face in a crowd of 12 distracter photographs. Results indicated that, compared to NACs, GSPs exhibited greater attentional biases for angry than for happy faces in a neutral crowd. GSPs were more slowed down in their performance by happy and angry versus neutral distracters; NACs did not exhibit such sensitivity to distracter type. Finally, GSPs were faster in detecting anger than disgust expressions; NACs detected both types of faces equally quickly. Implications of these findings for the maintenance of social phobia are discussed.     

Fear-relevant selective associations and social anxiety: absence of a positive bias

An illusory correlation paradigm was used to compare high and low socially anxious individuals' initial, on-line and a posteriori covariation estimates between emotional faces and aversive, pleasant and neutral outcomes. Overall, participants demonstrated an initial expectancy bias for aversive outcomes following angry faces, and pleasant outcomes following happy faces. On-line expectancy biases indicated that initial biases were extinguished during the task, with the exception of low socially anxious individuals who continued to over-associate positive social cues with pleasant outcomes. In addition to lacking this protective positive on-line bias, the high social anxiety group reported retrospectively more negative social cues than the low socially anxious group. Findings are discussed in relation to similar evidence from recent interpretive and memory paradigms.     

Influence of facial expression on memory for facial identity: effects of visual features or emotional meaning?

Research has shown that neutral faces are better recognized when they had been presented with happy rather than angry expressions at study, suggesting that emotional signals conveyed by facial expressions influenced the encoding of novel facial identities in memory. An alternative explanation, however, would be that the influence of facial expression resulted from differences in the visual features of the expressions employed. In this study, this possibility was tested by manipulating facial expression at study versus test. In line with earlier studies, we found that neutral faces were better recognized when they had been previously encountered with happy rather than angry expressions. On the other hand, when neutral faces were presented at study and participants were later asked to recognize happy or angry faces of the same individuals, no influence of facial expression was detected. As the two experimental conditions involved exactly the same amount of changes in the visual features of the stimuli between study and test, the results cannot be simply explained by differences in the visual properties of different facial expressions and may instead reside in their specific emotional meaning. The findings further suggest that the influence of facial expression is due to disruptive effects of angry expressions rather than facilitative effects of happy expressions. This study thus provides additional evidence that facial identity and facial expression are not processed completely independently.     

Event-related potentials to schematic faces in social phobia

Social phobia has been associated with an attentional bias for angry faces. This study aimed at further characterising this attentional bias by investigating reaction times, heart rates, and ERPs while social phobics, spider phobics, and controls identified either the colour or the emotional quality of angry, happy, or neutral schematic faces. The emotional expression of angry faces did not interfere with the processing of their colour in social phobics, and heart rate, N170 amplitude and parietal late positive potentials (LPPs) of these subjects were also no different from those of non-phobic subjects. However, social phobics showed generally larger P1 amplitudes than non-phobic controls with spider phobic subjects in between. No general threat advantage for angry faces was found. All groups identified neutral schematic faces faster and showed larger late positive amplitudes to neutral than to emotional faces. Furthermore, in all groups the N170 was modulated by the emotional quality of faces. This effect was most pronounced in the emotion identification task.