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Effects of Attention on Dynamic Emotional Expressions
Processing
Liang Zhang 1, 2 , Brigitte Roeder 3 , and Kan Zhang 1
1 Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences,
100101, Beijing, China
2 Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences,
100049, Beijing, China
3 Biological Psychology and Neuropsychology,
20146, Hamburg, Germany
zhangl@psych.ac.cn
Abstract. Attention and emotion both play the crucial roles in human cognitive
processing. This study tried to investigate the relationship between attention and
emotion, using dynamic facial expressions which are natural and frequently en-
countered in everyday life. The results showed that the emotional expressions
are processed faster than the neutral ones when they are outside the current fo-
cus of attention. It indicates that the emotion processing is automatic and not
gated by the attention.
1 Introduction
Attention and emotion both play the crucial roles in human cognitive processing.
Emotion is one of the basic survival-related factors. It produces specific bodily re-
sponses, aimed at preparing the organism for crucial behavior. Specialized neural
systems are evolved for the rapid perceptual analysis of emotionally salient events,
such as emotional facial expressions. (M. Eimer, A. Holmes, 2003).
Meanwhile, numerous stimuli from the environment confront our limited process-
ing capacity simultaneously. The attention mechanism helps the brain select and
process only those stimuli most relevant to the ongoing behavior. But adaptive behav-
ior requires to monitor the environment and detect potential survival-related stimuli
(e.g., emotional) even when they are unexpected and not current task relevant or are
outside the focus of attention [2].
The notion that attention bias to the emotion was supported by some studies. They
provide the evidence that detection of emotional stimuli occurs rapidly and automati-
cally [3]. A controversial issue is whether the encoding and analysis of emotionally
salient events can occur independently of attention [4]. Recent studies provided con-
flicting results. In an fMRI study [5], spatial attention was manipulated by having
subjects respond to stimulus arrays containing two faces and two non-face stimuli
(houses). Four stimuli were presented with a cross in the center. Faces presented to
the left and right of the cross, and houses presented below and above the cross. Or
vice versus. In each trial, subjects either compared the two faces or the two houses.
Thus, the attention was manipulated on the face pair or on the house pair. And facial
 
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