University of California, San Diego
The Department of Psychology is Honored
to Present a Talk by
Arne Öhman
Karolinska Institute, Stockholm
"Emotion Drives Attention"
Presented on May 11, 2006
Location: The Crick Conference Room
Mandler Hall, room 3545
- Abstract:
- By definition emotional stimuli are relevant for the organism. Relevant stimuli make demands on attention, either because of top-down processes that define relevance, or because they interfere to capture attention if it is directed elsewhere. This presentation will discuss two interrelated data sets, one dealing with emotional responses to masked stimuli, and the other with effects of emotional stimuli in visual search paradigms. Participants fearful of snakes or spiders (but not of both) show elevated autonomic and amygdala responses when exposed to pictures of snakes or spiders that are not consciously recognized because of backward masking. Similar results have been reported for angry and fearful faces. Consistent with these findings, specifically fearful participants detect their feared animal (e.g., snakes) more effectively than non-feared animals (e.g., spiders) when they serve as a target among neutral distractors (e.g., flowers, mushrooms) in a visual search task. Again, similar visual search data have been reported for angry (versus happy) faces, particularly when schematic faces are used as stimuli. However, in a recent series of experiments we found more effective detection of happy than angry faces among neutral faces irrespective of social anxiety, when the stimuli were photographs of real faces. This effect may be due to more effective recognition of happy faces than of other faces (neutral, fearful or happy). However, the happy advantage is dependent on gender and on what could be construed as social context: when among strangers look for the happy female, but among familiar people, beware of the angry male.
- Dr. Öhman's curriculum vitae. (PDF file.)
