Task difficulty and response complexity modulate affective priming by emotional facial expressions.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Social Psychology

Background:

• The automaticity of processing emotional facial expressions is a key question in cognitive and social psychology.
• Previous research suggests emotional stimuli might be processed independently of attention.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether the processing of emotional facial expressions occurs automatically, irrespective of attentional resources.
• To examine the influence of attentional load and working memory load on affective priming.

Main Methods:

• An affective priming task was employed, where participants attended to either the emotion of a face or a non-emotional feature (glasses).
• Task difficulty was manipulated by varying the feature attended to (emotion vs. glasses) and the response complexity (easy vs. difficult shape discrimination).
• Affective priming was measured by interference/facilitation in valence decisions on target words.

Main Results:

• Significant affective priming effects were observed when attention was directed to emotion or glasses, but not when attending to a difficult shape feature.
• Increasing working memory load, through complex key-response mapping, equally reduced affective priming across all tasks.
• Attentional load and working memory load had additive effects on the reduction of affective priming.

Conclusions:

• The findings suggest that processing emotional facial expressions may not be entirely automatic.
• Both attentional and working memory resources appear to be necessary for affective priming, challenging theories of complete automaticity.
• Emotional face processing is modulated by cognitive load, indicating a greater reliance on controlled processes than previously assumed.