Journal
COGNITION & EMOTION
Volume 31, Issue 5, Pages 1041-1054Publisher
ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD
DOI: 10.1080/02699931.2016.1180281
Keywords
Threat; social anxiety; visual search; emotion; selective attention; facial expressions
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Funding
- NICHD Training Program in Social Development Grant by the National Institutes of Health's Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [NIH T32 HD007542]
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This study examined the effects of emotion priming on visual search in participants characterised for different levels of social anxiety. Participants were primed with five facial emotions (angry, fear, happy, neutral, and surprised) and one scrambled face immediately prior to visual search trials involving finding a slanted coloured line amongst distractors, as reaction times and accuracy to target detection were recorded. Results suggest that for individuals low in social anxiety, being primed with an angry, surprised, or fearful face facilitated visual search compared to being primed with scrambled, neutral or happy faces. However, these same emotions degraded visual search in participants with high levels of social anxiety. This study expands on previous research on the impact of emotion on attention, finding that amongst socially anxious individuals, the effects of priming with threat extend beyond initial attention capture or disengagement, degrading later visual search.
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