Participant mood modulates attention and eye movements in visual search for emotional faces

Research on visual search for emotional faces has yielded discrepant results, with some studies reporting advantages for angry faces (anger superiority effect) and others reporting a happy face advantage (happiness superiority effect). Researchers have sought to explain these phenomena through an emotional factors account: attributing the anger superiority effect to an innate threat detector, and the happiness superiority effect to a positivity bias that gives preference to positive stimuli. The alternative perceptual factors account proposes that salient perceptual features inherent to angry and happy faces drive these search asymmetries. As emotional and perceptual factors are intrinsically confounded in emotional faces, it has proven difficult to distinguish between the two accounts. In the present experiments, we distinguished between the two accounts by manipulating participant mood across three different conditions (neutral, angry, and happy), and asked participants to locate a variable emotional (angry or happy) target face. Eye-tracking measures revealed a significant mood-congruency effect for search efficiency, where fewer fixations were required to locate a mood-congruent target than a mood-incongruent target. These findings were obtained across two experiments using different face stimuli (dynamic vs. static faces), emotional and neutral nontargets, and different search requirements, indicating that participant mood can influence attention across a wide range of conditions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).