The effectiveness of a gaze cue depends on the facial expression of emotion: Evidence from simultaneous competing cues

The gaze of a fearful face should be a particularly effective cue to attention; it allows one to rapidly allocate attention to potential threats. Prior data from investigations of this issue have been mixed. We report a novel method in which the gazes of two faces simultaneously cued different directions. Across trials, the emotion expressed by each face varied between happy, neutral, and fearful. Results showed that attention followed a fearful gaze when it competed with a neutral gaze but did not consistently follow a happy gaze when it competed with a neutral gaze. These results suggest that fear moderates the effectiveness of gaze cuing, and we present a parsimonious account that reconciles previously inconsistent data. We also found that presenting a fearful and a happy face simultaneously eliminates this effect, suggesting that emotional expressions interact in ways that may be important for understanding how emotional stimuli influence attention in more complex environments.