Selective attention to affective stimuli and clinical depression among youths: Role of anxiety and specificity of emotion.

Cognitive models of psychopathology posit that the content or focus of information-processing biases (e.g., attentional biases) is disorder specific: Depression is hypothesized to be characterized by attentional biases specifically for depression-relevant stimuli (e.g., sad facial expressions), whereas anxiety should relate particularly to attentional biases to threat-relevant stimuli (e.g., angry faces). However, little research has investigated this specificity hypothesis and none with a sample of youths. The present study examined attentional biases to emotional faces (sad, angry, and happy compared with neutral) in groups of pure depressed, pure anxious, comorbid depressed and anxious, and control youths (ages 9–17 years; N = 161). Consistent with cognitive models, pure depressed and pure anxious youths exhibited attentional biases specifically to sad and angry faces, respectively, whereas comorbid youths exhibited attentional biases to both facial expressions. In addition, control youths exhibited attentional avoidance of sad faces, and comorbid boys avoided happy faces. Overall, findings suggest that cognitive biases and processing of particular emotional information are specific to pure clinical depression and anxiety, and results inform etiological models of potentially specific processes that are associated with internalizing disorders among youths. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Selective attention to emotional faces following recovery from depression.

This study was designed to examine attentional biases in the processing of emotional faces in currently and formerly depressed participants and healthy controls. Using a dot-probe task, the authors presented faces expressing happy or sad emotions paired with emotionally neutral faces. Whereas both currently and formerly depressed participants selectively attended to the sad faces, the control participants selectively avoided the sad faces and oriented toward the happy faces, a positive bias that was not observed for either of the depressed groups. These results indicate that attentional biases in the processing of emotional faces are evident even after individuals have recovered from a depressive episode. Implications of these findings for understanding the roles of cognitive and interpersonal functioning in depression are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

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. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Biases in eye movements to threatening facial expressions in generalized anxiety disorder and depressive disorder.

The study investigated biases in selective attention to emotional face stimuli in generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and depressive disorder, using a modified probe detection task. There were 4 face types: threatening, sad, happy, and neutral. Measures of attentional bias included (a) the direction and latency of the initial eye movement in response to the faces and (b) manual reaction time (RT) to probes replacing the face stimuli 1,000 ms after their onset. Results showed that individuals with GAD (without depressive disorder) were more likely to look first toward threat faces rather than neutral faces compared with normal controls and those with depressive disorder. They also shifted their gaze more quickly toward threat faces, rather than away from them, relative to the other two groups. There were no significant findings from the manual RT data. Implications of the results for recent theories of clinical anxiety and depression are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Is this happiness I see? Biases in the identification of emotional facial expressions in depression and social phobia.

The present study was designed to examine the operation of depression-specific biases in the identification or labeling of facial expression of emotions. Participants diagnosed with major depression and social phobia and control participants were presented with faces that expressed increasing degrees of emotional intensity, slowly changing from a neutral to a full-intensity happy, sad, or angry expression. The authors assessed individual differences in the intensity of facial expression of emotion that was required for the participants to accurately identify the emotion being expressed. The depressed participants required significantly greater intensity of emotion than did the social phobic and the control participants to correctly identify happy expressions and less intensity to identify sad than angry expressions. In contrast, social phobic participants needed less intensity to correctly identify the angry expressions than did the depressed and control participants and less intensity to identify angry than sad expressions. Implications of these results for interpersonal functioning in depression and social phobia are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Selective Attention to Angry Faces in Clinical Social Phobia.

This study investigated the time course of attentional responses to emotional facial expressions in a clinical sample with social phobia. With a visual probe task, photographs of angry, happy, and neutral faces were presented at 2 exposure durations: 500 and 1,250 ms. At 500 ms, the social phobia group showed enhanced vigilance for angry faces, relative to happy and neutral faces, in comparison with normal controls. In the 1,250-ms condition, there were no significant attentional biases in the social phobia group. Results are consistent with a bias in initial orienting to threat cues in social anxiety. Findings are discussed in relation to recent cognitive models of anxiety disorders. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Identification of emotional facial expressions following recovery from depression.

This study investigated the identification of facial expressions of emotion in currently nondepressed participants who had a history of recurrent depressive episodes (recurrent major depression; RMD) and never-depressed control participants (CTL). Following a negative mood induction, participants were presented with faces whose expressions slowly changed from neutral to full intensity. Identification of facial expressions was measured by the intensity of the expression at which participants could accurately identify whether faces expressed happiness, sadness, or anger. There were no group differences in the identification of sad or angry expressions. Compared with CTL participants, however, RMD participants required significantly greater emotional intensity in the faces to correctly identify happy expressions. These results indicate that biases in the processing of emotional facial expressions are evident even after individuals have recovered from a depressive episode. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Corrugator muscle responses are associated with individual differences in positivity-negativity bias.

Corrugator supercilii muscle activity is considered an objective measure of valence because it increases in response to negatively valenced facial expressions (angry) and decreases to positive expressions (happy). The authors sought to determine if corrugator activity could be used as an objective measure of positivity-negativity bias. The authors recorded corrugator responses as participants rated angry, happy, and surprised faces as “positive” or “negative.” The critical measure of bias was the percentage of positive versus negative ratings assigned to surprised faces by each participant. Reaction times for surprise expressions were longer than for happy and angry expressions, consistent with their ambiguous valence. Participants who tended to rate surprised faces as negative showed increased corrugator activity to surprised faces, whereas those who tended to rate surprise as positive showed decreased activity. Critically, corrugator responses reflected the participants’ bias (i.e., their tendency to rate surprise as positive or negative). These data show that surprised faces constitute a useful tool for assessing individual differences in positivity-negativity bias, and that corrugator activity can objectively reflect this bias. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Coherence and Specificity of Information-Processing Biases in Depression and Social Phobia.

Research has not resolved whether depression is associated with a distinct information-processing bias, whether the content of the information-processing bias in depression is specific to themes of loss and sadness, or whether biases are consistent across the tasks most commonly used to assess attention and memory processing. In the present study, participants diagnosed with major depression, social phobia, or no Axis I disorder, completed several information-processing tasks assessing attention and memory for sad, socially threatening, physically threatening, and positive stimuli. As predicted, depressed participants exhibited specific biases for stimuli connoting sadness; social phobic participants did not evidence such specificity for threat stimuli. It is important to note that the different measures of bias in memory and attention were not systematically intercorrelated. Implications for the study of cognitive bias in depression, and for cognitive theory more broadly, are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Updating positive and negative stimuli in working memory in depression.

Difficulties in the ability to update stimuli in working memory (WM) may underlie the problems with regulating emotions that lead to the development and perpetuation of mood disorders such as depression. To examine the ability to update affective material in WM, the authors had diagnosed depressed and never-disordered control participants perform an emotion 2-back task in which participants were presented with a series of happy, sad, and neutral faces and were asked to indicate whether the current face had the same (match-set) or different (break-set or no-set) emotional expression as that presented 2 faces earlier. Participants also performed a 0-back task with the same emotional stimuli to serve as a control for perceptual processing. After transforming reaction times to control for baseline group differences, depressed and nondepressed participants exhibited biases in updating emotional content that reflects the tendency to keep negative information and positive information, respectively, active in WM. Compared with controls, depressed participants were both slower to disengage from sad stimuli and faster to disengage from happy facial expressions. In contrast, nondepressed controls took longer to disengage from happy stimuli than from neutral or sad stimuli. These group differences in reaction times may reflect both protective and maladaptive biases in WM that underlie the ability to effectively regulate negative affect. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Integration of social and utilitarian factors in decision making.

Decision making is influenced by social cues, but there is little understanding of how social information interacts with other cues that determine decisions. To address this quantitatively, participants were asked to learn which of two faces was associated with a higher probability of reward. They were repeatedly presented with two faces, each with a different, unknown probability of reward, and participants attempted to maximize gains by selecting the face that was most often rewarded. Both faces had the same identity, but one face had a happy expression and the other had either an angry or a sad expression. Ideal observer models predict that the facial expressions should not affect the decision-making process. Our results however showed that participants had a prior disposition to select the happy face when it was paired with the angry but not the sad face and overweighted the positive outcomes associated with happy faces and underweighted positive outcomes associated with either angry or sad faces. Nevertheless, participants also integrated the feedback information. As such, their decisions were a composite of social and utilitarian factors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Selective preference in visual fixation away from negative images in old age? An eye-tracking study.

Recent studies have suggested that older individuals selectively forget negative information. However, findings on a positivity effect in the attention of older adults have been more mixed. In the current study, eye tracking was used to record visual fixation in nearly real-time to investigate whether older individuals show a positivity effect in their visual attention to emotional information. Young and old individuals (N = 64) viewed pairs of synthetic faces that included the same face in a nonemotional expression and in 1 of 4 emotional expressions (happiness, sadness, anger, or fear). Gaze patterns were recorded as individuals viewed the face pairs. Older adults showed an attentional preference toward happy faces and away from angry ones; the only preference shown by young adults was toward afraid faces. The age groups were not different in overall cognitive functioning, suggesting that these attentional differences are specific and motivated rather than due to general cognitive change with age. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

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. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Detection of emotional faces: Salient physical features guide effective visual search.

In this study, the authors investigated how salient visual features capture attention and facilitate detection of emotional facial expressions. In a visual search task, a target emotional face (happy, disgusted, fearful, angry, sad, or surprised) was presented in an array of neutral faces. Faster detection of happy and, to a lesser extent, surprised and disgusted faces was found both under upright and inverted display conditions. Inversion slowed down the detection of these faces less than that of others (fearful, angry, and sad). Accordingly, the detection advantage involves processing of featural rather than configural information. The facial features responsible for the detection advantage are located in the mouth rather than the eye region. Computationally modeled visual saliency predicted both attentional orienting and detection. Saliency was greatest for the faces (happy) and regions (mouth) that were fixated earlier and detected faster, and there was close correspondence between the onset of the modeled saliency peak and the time at which observers initially fixated the faces. The authors conclude that visual saliency of specific facial features--especially the smiling mouth--is responsible for facilitated initial orienting, which thus shortens detection. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

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. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effects of subliminal anger and sadness primes on agency appraisals.

Two studies examined whether appraisals can be differentially affected by subliminal anger and sadness primes. Participants from Singapore (Experiment 1) and China (Experiment 2) were exposed to either subliminal angry faces or subliminal sad faces. Supporting appraisal theories of emotions, participants exposed to subliminal angry faces were more likely to appraise negative events as caused by other people and those exposed to subliminal sad faces were more likely to appraise the same events as caused by situational factors. The results provide the first evidence for subliminal emotion-specific cognitive effects. They show that cognitive functions such as appraisals can be affected by subliminal emotional stimuli of the same valence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Biased recognition of positive faces in aging and amnestic mild cognitive impairment.

We investigated age differences in biased recognition of happy, neutral, or angry faces in 4 experiments. Experiment 1 revealed increased true and false recognition for happy faces in older adults, which persisted even when changing each face’s emotional expression from study to test in Experiment 2. In Experiment 3, we examined the influence of reduced memory capacity on the positivity-induced recognition bias, which showed the absence of emotion-induced memory enhancement but a preserved recognition bias for positive faces in patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment compared with older adults with normal memory performance. In Experiment 4, we used semantic differentials to measure the connotations of happy and angry faces. Younger and older participants regarded happy faces as more familiar than angry faces, but the older group showed a larger recognition bias for happy faces. This finding indicates that older adults use a gist-based memory strategy based on a semantic association between positive emotion and familiarity. Moreover, older adults’ judgments of valence were more positive for both angry and happy faces, supporting the hypothesis of socioemotional selectivity. We propose that the positivity-induced recognition bias might be based on fluency, which in turn is based on both positivity-oriented emotional goals and on preexisting semantic associations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Social categorization and the perception of facial affect: Target race moderates the response latency advantage for happy faces.

Two experiments competitively test 3 potential mechanisms (negativity inhibiting responses, feature-based accounts, and evaluative context) for the response latency advantage for recognizing happy expressions by investigating how the race of a target can moderate the strength of the effect. Both experiments indicate that target race modulates the happy face advantage, such that European American participants displayed the happy face advantage for White target faces, but displayed a response latency advantage for angry (Experiments 1 and 2) and sad (Experiment 2) Black target faces. This pattern of findings is consistent with an evaluative context mechanism and inconsistent with negativity inhibition and feature-based accounts of the happy face advantage. Thus, the race of a target face provides an evaluative context in which facial expressions are categorized. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attention for emotional faces under restricted awareness revisited: Do emotional faces automatically attract attention?

Theoretical models of attention for affective information have assigned a special status to the cognitive processing of emotional facial expressions. One specific claim in this regard is that emotional faces automatically attract visual attention. In three experiments, the authors investigated attentional cueing by angry, happy, and neutral facial expressions that were presented under conditions of limited awareness. In these experiments, facial expressions were presented in a masked (14 ms or 34 ms, masked by a neutral face) and unmasked fashion (34 ms or 100 ms). Compared with trials containing neutral cues, delayed responding was found on trials with emotional cues in the unmasked, 100-ms condition, suggesting stronger allocation of cognitive resources to emotional faces. However, in both masked and unmasked conditions, the hypothesized cueing of visual attention to the location of emotional facial expression was not found. In contrary, attentional cueing by emotional faces was less strong compared with neutral faces in the unmasked, 100-ms condition. These data suggest that briefly presented emotional faces influence cognitive processing but do not automatically capture visual attention. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)