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Emotion Drives Attention: Detecting the Snake in the Grass
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
Abstract and Figures
Participants searched for discrepant fear-relevant pictures (snakes or spiders) in grid-pattern arrays of fear-irrelevant pictures belonging to the same category (flowers or mushrooms) and vice versa. Fear-relevant pictures were found more quickly than fear-irrelevant ones. Fear-relevant, but not fear-irrelevant, search was unaffected by the location of the target in the display and by the number of distractors, which suggests parallel search for fear-relevant targets and serial search for fear-irrelevant targets. Participants specifically fearful of snakes but not spiders (or vice versa) showed facilitated search for the feared objects but did not differ from controls in search for nonfeared fear-relevant or fear-irrelevant, targets. Thus, evolutionary relevant threatening stimuli were effective in capturing attention, and this effect was further facilitated if the stimulus was emotionally provocative.
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... The fast response to spiders was more applicable to human evolution, the survey described. 26 Triskaidekaphobia: The strange aversion to or fear of the number '13'. The fear of 13 th Friday known as Paraskevidekatriaphobia (Greek origin) or Friggatriskaidekaphobia (Old Norse). ...
A phobia can be described as an excessive and irrational fear. Phobias are a widespread but multifaceted manifestation of anxiety disorders, defined as longstanding and irrational fear of particular objects, situations, or activities. The present review article describes the psychological, physiological, and behavioural features of phobias, discussing their etiology, classification, and influence on persons' everyday lives. Also, the paper evaluates several different approaches to treatment, such as exposure therapy, cognitive-behavioural therapies, and medications, examining how effective they are at treating phobic reactions. In addition, the review points out current trends in research and novel viewpoints that make phobia management more comprehensive. Furthermore, Phobias are ill-understood and shrouded in myths that lead to misconceptions and stigma. This article is a critical analysis of some of the common myths regarding phobias, juxtaposed against evidence-based psychological and neurological research. Based on the examination of recent studies and clinical insights, the review article explains phobias in terms of their nature, causation, and treatment practices. The aim is to remove misinformation and foster greater factual knowledge of phobic disorders in professional and public discourse. This paper hopes to establish a sound basis for the understanding of phobias and the implementation of successful intervention techniques.
... The fast response to spiders was more applicable to human evolution, the survey described. 26 Triskaidekaphobia: The strange aversion to or fear of the number '13'. The fear of 13 th Friday known as Paraskevidekatriaphobia (Greek origin) or Friggatriskaidekaphobia (Old Norse). ...
A phobia can be described as an excessive and irrational fear. Phobias are a widespread but multifaceted manifestation of anxiety disorders, defined as longstanding and irrational fear of particular objects, situations, or activities. The present review article describes the psychological, physiological, and behavioural features of phobias, discussing their etiology, classification, and influence on persons' everyday lives. Also, the paper evaluates several different approaches to treatment, such as exposure therapy, cognitive-behavioural therapies, and medications, examining how effective they are at treating phobic reactions. In addition, the review points out current trends in research and novel viewpoints that make phobia management more comprehensive. Furthermore, Phobias are ill-understood and shrouded in myths that lead to misconceptions and stigma. This article is a critical analysis of some of the common myths regarding phobias, juxtaposed against evidence-based psychological and neurological research. Based on the examination of recent studies and clinical insights, the review article explains phobias in terms of their nature, causation, and treatment practices. The aim is to remove misinformation and foster greater factual knowledge of phobic disorders in professional and public discourse. This paper hopes to establish a sound basis for the understanding of phobias and the implementation of successful intervention techniques.
... These paradigms include conjunctive and complex visual search tasks, 22 as well as search tasks specifically designed for threat detection, like the previously mentioned study concerning predators. 23 Whether these paradigms are comparable to the real worldlive threats, constantly moving threats, etc-is still up for debate. ...
This paper explores theories and evidence supporting visual search ability being an evolutionary advantage in people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), resulting in the persistence of the Broader Autism Phenotype (BAP) in the gene pool. Through evaluation of the existing psychological literature, an overview of the evolutionary advantages of superior visual search ability are reviewed, with focus on those in threat detection and foraging behaviour. Explorations of the experimentally found superiority among those with genetic markers for autism are discussed through the perspective of destigmatization of the disorder. The paper details that the superiority holds among various experimental paradigms with moderate effect sizes even in variable age groups. It overviews the Autism Advantage and evaluates the validity of research in this area. The paper concludes that individuals with ASD have generally advantageous visual search abilities in comparison to neurotypical control populations which may be indicative of an evolutionary trade-off of the disorder.
... It can be argued that emotional facial expressions do not conclusively represent a top-down manipulation, since as facial expressions may directly influence participants' perceptions or response without requiring the same level of conscious interpretation that would be required for processing other types of information such as group membership (sex, ethnicity). Facial expression may therefore represent a stimulus-driven manipulation instead of a top-down, or social, manipulation, also because emotional expressions are processed in a subconscious manner to an extent that is not the case for other person-related aspects such as sex (Ohman et al., 2001). Also, as we argue in the next section, top-down manipulations may only increase automatic imitation if participants are placed in an experimental condition in which they expect to cooperate with the distractors (Gleibs et al., 2016). ...
Converging evidence from behavioural, neuroimaging, and neurostimulation studies demonstrates that action observation engages corresponding action production mechanisms, a phenomenon termed covert or automatic imitation. Behaviourally, automatic imitation is measured using the stimulus response compatibility (SRC) task, in which participants produce vocal responses whilst perceiving compatible or incompatible speech distractors. Automatic imitation is measured as the difference in response times (RT) between incompatible and compatible trials. It is unclear if and how social group membership, such as the speaker’s sex, affects automatic imitation. Two theoretical accounts make different predictions regarding effects of group membership: the first predicts that automatic imitation can be modulated by group membership, while the second predicts that automatic imitation likely remains unaffected. We tested these predictions for participant sex and distractor sex in an online vocal SRC task. Female and male participants completed an SRC task presenting female or male distractor stimuli. The results show that automatic imitation is not modulated by group membership as signalled by sex. Implications of these results regarding the nature of automatic imitation as a largely stimulus-driven process are considered.
During sleep, recognizing threatening signals is crucial to determine when to wake up and when to continue vital sleep functions. Screaming is perhaps the most efficient way for communicating danger at a distance or in conditions of limited visibility. Screams are characterized by rapid modulations of sound pressure in the so-called roughness range (i.e., 30–150 Hz) which are particularly powerful in capturing attention. However, whether these rough sounds are also processed in a privileged manner during sleep is unknown. We tested this hypothesis by presenting human participants with low-intensity vocalizations, including rough screams and neutral, low-roughness vocalizations during wakefulness and during a full night of sleep. We found that screams evoked cortical responses with higher theta phase-consistency as compared to neutral vocalizations during both wakefulness and NREM sleep. In addition, screams boosted sleep spindle power, suggesting elevated stimulus salience. These findings demonstrate that, even at low sound intensity (e.g., from a distant source), vocalizations’ roughness conveys stimulus relevance and enhances exogenous processing in both the waking and sleeping states. Preserved differential neural responses based on stimulus salience may ensure adaptive reactions in a state where the brain is mostly disconnected from external inputs.
Supplementary Information
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1038/s41598-025-01560-8.
The rapid emotional evaluation of objects and events is essential in daily life. While visual scenes reliably evoke emotions, it remains unclear whether emotion schemas evoked by daily-life scenes depend on object processing systems or are extracted independently. To explore this, we collected emotion ratings for 4913 daily-life scenes from 300 participants, and predicted these ratings from representations in deep neural networks and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) activity patterns in visual cortex. AlexNet, an object-based model, outperformed EmoNet, an emotion-based model, in predicting emotion ratings for daily-life scenes, while EmoNet excelled for explicitly evocative scenes. Emotion information was processed hierarchically within the object recognition system, consistent with the visual cortex’s organization. Activity patterns in the lateral occipital complex (LOC), an object-selective region, reliably predicted emotion ratings and outperformed other visual regions. These findings suggest that the emotional evaluation of daily-life scenes is mediated by visual object processing, with additional mechanisms engaged when object content is uninformative.
Detecting dominant individuals within crowds is crucial for human survival, prompting investigation into the tension between quick detection and careful recognition of dominant faces. In our visual search tasks, participants located a target face with a specific identity, with dominance being task-irrelevant. Targets varied in dominance (high or low), and the dominance congruency between targets and distractors was manipulated. Results showed more efficient search when targets differed from distractors by dominance, suggesting leverage of latent dominance contrast. Surprisingly, searching for high-dominance faces exhibited lower efficiency. Experiment 2 replicated these findings and incorporated eye-tracking, revealing longer distractor inspection, more revisits to target faces, and prolonged identification times for high-dominance face searches. Experiment 3 showed search inefficiency even with only dominant faces’ eye regions, underscoring the role of local features. Our findings offer a nuanced perspective on how perceived dominance influences cognition and behavior, challenging the assumed ease of dominance detection.
Fear learning processes are often considered underlying mechanisms in the development and maintenance of various anxiety- and stress-related disorders. However, limited attention has been paid to whether these changes are shared across disorders or certain symptoms. In this context, transdiagnostic research on symptom dimensions is especially relevant, as it addresses the significant symptom overlap and heterogeneity observed in anxiety disorders and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). In the current study, we investigated attentional processes (late positive potential), defensive responding (fear-potentiated startle), and subjective ratings (US-expectancy) in a transdiagnostic sample of participants with OCD (n=38), social phobia (n=39), specific phobia (n=40), and control participants (n=39). We focused on two transdiagnostic anxiety dimensions: anxious arousal and anxious apprehension. A differential fear learning paradigm using geometrical forms was employed, including a habituation, acquisition, generalization, and extinction phase. We observed successful fear acquisition across all outcomes, which generalized to the stimulus most similar to the CS+. While fear responses to the CS+ decreased during extinction, they remained significantly elevated compared to the CS-. The results revealed no differences between the diagnostic groups for neither phase, stimulus nor outcome measure. On a dimensional level, anxious arousal was associated with an increased shock expectancy to the CS+ during acquisition, while depressive symptoms were associated with a higher shock expectancy for both CS+ and CS- during extinction. The unexpected absence of differences between diagnostic groups, along with the modulating dimensional effects, supports the utility of these transdiagnostic symptom dimensions in unraveling altered fear learning processes in internalizing disorders.
While affective salience effects have been observed consistently in the late positive potential (LPP), no event-related potential (ERP) component has consistently shown ordered valence effects. A recent study, showing images of facial attractiveness, however suggests the existence of valence-related effects at very long latencies (1000-3000 ms post stimulus). This could offer new insights into the time-course of affective neural processing. Yet, it remains unclear whether the long-latency effect was specific to facial attractiveness, or to valence in general. To corroborate the existence of a long-latency valence effect, we presented distinctly positive, neutral, and negative valenced IAPS images to a large sample of 224 participants while recording their electroenceph-alogram (EEG). Larger ERP amplitudes were elicited by both positively and negatively valenced compared to neutral stimuli (an affective salience effect) from roughly 500 until 1300 ms, followed by an ordered valence effect of larger amplitudes to negatively compared to positively valenced images from 1500 until 2500 ms. These findings corroborate the previously observed sequence of an affective salience effect followed by a long-latency valence effect. However, the polarity of this valence effect was reversed from that of the facial attractiveness study. Allostasis is discussed as potential reconciling factor. Effects in the N2 and P300 components were also found, but could not be clearly labeled as an affective salience or a valence effect. These results fit with two-stage emotion theories such as the theory of constructed emotions.
Celem niniejszej pracy było zbadanie, czy znak afektywny i rodzaj słów wpływa na efektywność zapamiętywania nowego materiału werbalnego w odtwarzaniu bezpośrednim i odroczonym w zależności od uczuciowości rozumianej jako skłonność badanych do przeżywania pozytywnego lub negatywnego afektu. Analiza wyników wykazała, że na efektywność świadomego zapamiętywania nowego materiału werbalnego mają trwały i największy wpływ znak afektywny pseudosłów oraz moment ich odtwarzania. Zarówno w procesie przypominania, jak i rozpoznawania moment odtwarzania istotnie wpływa na poziom zapamiętywania w zależności od znaku afektywnego, natomiast niezależnie od tego, czy słowa mają znaczenie konkretne, czy abstrakcyjne. Pseudosłowa nacechowane afektywnie są lepiej pamiętane niż neutralne, a z upływem czasu słowa pozytywne są lepiej pamiętane niż negatywne. Uczuciowość badanych rozumiana jako tendencja do przeżywania pozytywnego lub negatywnego afektu nie ma izolowanego wpływu na efektywność zapamiętywania, natomiast moderuje wpływ rodzaju pseudosłów na poziom zapamiętywania, ale efekt ten nie jest trwały. Wynika z tego, że pamięć nie zależy od indywidualnych skłonności emocjonalnych.
To study the mechanisms underlying covert orienting of attention in visual space, subjects were given advance cues indicating the probable locations of targets that they had to discriminate and localize. Direct peripheral cues (brightening of one of four boxes in peripheral vision) and symbolic central cues (an arrow at the fixation point indicating a probable peripheral box) were compared. Peripheral and central cues are believed to activate different reflexive and voluntary modes of orienting (Jonides, 1981; Posner, 1980). Experiment 1 showed that the time courses of facilitation and inhibition from peripheral and central cues were characteristic and different. Experiment 2 showed that voluntary orienting in response to symbolic central cues is interrupted by reflexive orienting to random peripheral flashes. Experiment 3 showed that irrelevant peripheral flashes also compete with relevant peripheral cues. The amount of interference varied systematically with the interval between the onset of the relevant cue and of the distracting flash (cue-flash onset asynchrony) and with the cuing condition. Taken together, these effects support a model for spatial attention with distinct but interacting reflexive and voluntary orienting mechanisms.
Theories of visual attention deal with the limit on our ability to see (and later report) several things at once. These theories fall into three broad classes. Object-based theories propose a limit on the number of separate objects that can be perceived simultaneously. Discrimination-based theories propose a limit on the number of separate discriminations that can be made. Space-based theories propose a limit on the spatial area from which information can be taken up. To distinguish these views, the present experiments used small (less than 1 degree), brief, foveal displays, each consisting of two overlapping objects (a box with a line struck through it). It was found that two judgments that concern the same object can be made simultaneously without loss of accuracy, whereas two judgments that concern different objects cannot. Neither the similarity nor the difficulty of required discriminations, nor the spatial distribution of information, could account for the results. The experiments support a view in which parallel, preattentive processes serve to segment the field into separate objects, followed by a process of focal attention that deals with only one object at a time. This view is also able to account for results taken to support both discrimination-based and space-based theories.
Like so many of the individuals whose behavior it purports to explain, psychology has an ambivalent, if not neurotic, relationship to its parents. This is particularly true for its most legitimate mother discipline, biology, where the ambivalence can take advantage of a tendency toward a split personality in the discipline itself. Just at about the time Wilhelm Wundt set the stage for psychology by marrying philosophy and physiology, the seed to the split was planted in Charles Darwin’s theory of the evolution of species.
In the last fifteen years, there has been an explosion in the application of experimental cognitive paradigms within the research on emotional disorders. One of the most fruitful lines of research in this area is the study of selective attention in persons suffering from an emotional disorder. Several paradigms have been employed to examine this attentional bias (e.g. dichotic listening, Emotional Stroop, visual dot-probe task) and to demonstrate how task performance is facilitated or inhibited due to the presentation of a stimulus that is related to the emotional concerns of the participants. A problem associated with these paradigms is that they only measure attention deployment at a very specific moment immediately after the presentation of the emotional stimulus, but are not suitable for capturing the course of selective attention over longer time periods. In a study with spider anxious participants, we used on-line registration of eye movements as a continuous index of attention deployment towards emotionally relevant (spiders) or irrelevant (flowers) material. Viewing patterns were registered during a 3- second presentation of stimuli composed of a picture of a spider and a picture of a flower. Results show that spider anxious participants looked significantly more at spiders than at flowers during the beginning of the stimulus presentation, but subsequently their viewing pattern shifted more and more away from the spiders. Control participants showed a more stable pattern as they looked more at spiders than at flowers throughout the trial. A traditional attentional bias effect could, however, not be replicated.
Three studies investigated whether individuals preferentially allocate attention to the spatial location of threatening faces presented outside awareness. Pairs of face stimuli were briefly displayed and masked in a modified version of the dot-probe task. Each face pair consisted of an emotional (threat or happy) and neutral face. The hypothesis that preattentive processing of threat results in attention being oriented towards its location was supported in Experiments 1 and 3. In both studies, this effect was most apparent in the left visual field, suggestive of right hemisphere involvement. However, in Experiment 2 where awareness of the faces was less restricted (i.e. marginal threshold conditions), preattentive capture of attention by threat was not evident. There was evidence from Experiment 3 that the tendency to orient attention towards masked threat faces was greater in high than low trait anxious individuals.