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Published on: November 30, 2018
Modality-specific attentional biases to facial vs. vocal emotions
M Morningstar1,2, O Merulla3, R J T Bonar3
1Department of Psychology, Queen's University, Kingston, Canada. michele.morningstar@queensu.ca.
Psychological Research
|August 7, 2026
Summary
Emotional faces and voices capture attention differently. Vocal emotional stimuli showed larger, more dynamic attentional biases compared to facial stimuli in this study.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Neuroscience
- Affective Science
Background:
- Attentional biases for emotional information are well-studied in visual perception.
- Theoretical models debate whether attentional processes generalize across nonverbal modalities like faces and voices.
- Empirical evidence directly comparing attentional biases to emotional faces versus voices is lacking.
Purpose of the Study:
- To directly compare attentional biases to emotional expressions in facial and vocal modalities.
- To investigate modality-specific differences in how emotional faces and voices capture attentional resources.
- To examine temporal dynamics of attentional allocation across trials for different nonverbal emotional stimuli.
Main Methods:
- Utilized dot-probe tasks to measure response times associated with attentional bias.
- Presented simultaneous pairings of emotional (angry, happy) and neutral faces or voices.
- Assessed participants' difficulty disengaging from emotional versus neutral stimuli across modalities.
Main Results:
- Greater difficulty disengaging from non-target stimuli was observed in the vocal modality compared to the facial modality.
- Attentional bias towards vocal emotional stimuli shifted from avoidance to vigilance across trials.
- No significant change in attentional bias towards facial stimuli was observed across the task duration.
Conclusions:
- Attentional biases to emotional voices appear larger in magnitude and more dynamic than those to emotional faces.
- Findings suggest distinct patterns of attentional allocation for emotional information across nonverbal modalities.
- Further research is needed to explore stimulus and task features influencing modality-specific attentional biases to emotion.
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