The influence of working memory on visual search for emotional facial expressions

In visual search tasks, an angry face surrounded by happy faces is more rapidly detected compared with a happy face surrounded by angry faces. This is called the anger superiority effect. The anger superiority effect has been mainly related to automatic attentional effects, but top-down mechanisms may also influence this effect. In a series of studies, we investigated the influence of holding emotional information in working memory (WM) on the anger superiority effect. In multiple experiments, participants were generally faster to find an angry target with happy distractors compared to a happy target with angry distractors. However, this anger superiority effect was diminished when holding angry information in WM, whereas the effect was still observed when holding happy information. These effects were not observed when participants did not remember emotional information other than the color of the emotional stimuli. The data indicate that enhanced processing of distractor facial expressions was observed when they matched the content of WM, facilitating target detection. However, when the contents of WM and distractor faces differed, the processing of distractor faces and detection of a target face were delayed. These results suggest that the anger superiority effect is modulated by top-down effects of WM and that interactions between contents of WM and perception of facial expressions determine the enhancement or reduction of the anger superiority effect.