Attending to emotional faces in the flanker task: Probably much less automatic than previously assumed

Attention to emotional faces was tested in a series of 5 experiments using the flanker paradigm. Distraction and compatibility effects that were stronger for emotional compared to neutral faces were found in only one of the studies. No reliable differences were found between faces displaying different emotions. The data suggest that attentional capture of emotional faces depends on emotion being a task relevant feature, indicating that attention has to be intentionally allocated to emotional information for those effects to materialize. Our findings also indicate that attending to emotions due to task requirements is not a sufficient condition for an attentional bias towards emotional faces. Even within emotion classification tasks, we only found reliable attentional prioritizing of emotional faces when the position of the target stimulus varied across trials and had to be identified on the basis of an additional feature, thus rendering the processing of the flanker stimuli obligatory in the task. In sum, these findings indicate that automatic attentional capture by emotional faces is a highly conditional phenomenon. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).