A substantial body of research has established that even when we are not consciously aware of the faces of others we are nevertheless sensitive to, and impacted by their facial expression. In this paper, we consider this body of research from a new perspective by examining the functions of unconscious perception revealed by these studies. A consideration of the literature from this perspective highlights that existing research methods are limited when it comes to revealing possible functions of unconscious perception. The (...) critical shortcoming is that in all of the methods, the perceived facial expression remains outside of awareness. This is a problem because there are good reasons to believe that one important function of unconsciously perceived negative faces is to attract attention so that they are consciously perceived; such conscious perception, however, is never allowed with existing methodologies. We discuss recent studies of emotional face perception under conditions of visual search that address this issue directly. Further, we suggest that methodologies that do not examine cognitive processes as they occur in more natural settings may result in fundamental misunderstandings of human cognition. (shrink)

Faces are characterized by the simultaneous presence of several evaluation-relevant features, for example, emotional expression and (prejudiced) ethnicity. The social message account (SMA) hypothesizes the immediate integration of emotion and ethnicity. According to SMA, happy in-group faces should be interpreted as benevolent, whereas happy out-group faces should be interpreted as potentially malevolent. By contrast, fearful in-group faces should be interpreted as signaling an unsafe environment, whereas fearful out-group faces should be interpreted as signaling inferiority. In contrast, the processing conflict account (...) (PCA) assumes that each face conveys two rather independent evaluative features, emotion and ethnicity. Thus, stimuli might be either affectively congruent or incongruent, and thereby exert influences on behavior. The article reviews the evidence with regard to the two accounts before reporting an experiment that aims at disentangling them. In an approach/avoidance task (AAT), either happy/fearful faces of German and Turks were presented or happy/fearful faces of young and old persons. There are prejudices against Turk/Middle-eastern persons (in Germany) as well as against old persons. For SMA, the two prejudices are of different type; thus prediction for the AAT diverge for the two group conditions. In contrast, for PCA both group features (i.e., Turk ethnicity and old age) are negative features (in comparison to their counterparts) which are affectively congruent or incongruent to the emotional expression. Hence, the results pattern in the AAT should be comparable for the two group conditions. In accordance with SMA but in contrast to PCA, we found different patterns for the two group conditions. (shrink)

We examined interference effects of emotionally associated background colours during fast valence categorisations of negative, neutral and positive expressions. According to implicitly learned colour–emotion associations, facial expressions were presented with colours that either matched the valence of these expressions or not. Experiment 1 included infrequent non-matching trials and Experiment 2 a balanced ratio of matching and non-matching trials. Besides general modulatory effects of contextual features on the processing of facial expressions, we found differential effects depending on the valance of target (...) facial expressions. Whereas performance accuracy was mainly affected for neutral expressions, performance speed was specifically modulated by emotional expressions indicating some susceptibility of emotional expressions to contextual features. Experiment 3 used two further colour–emotion combinations, but revealed only marginal interference effects most likely due to missing colour–emotion associations. The results are discussed with respect to inherent processing demands of emotional and neutral expressions and their susceptibility to contextual interference. (shrink)

This study explored attention and interpretation biases in processing facial expressions as correlates of theoretically distinct self-reported anger experience, expression, and control. Non-selected undergraduate students completed cognitive tasks measuring attention bias, interpretation bias, and Spielberger’s State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory. Attention bias toward angry faces was associated with higher trait anger and anger expression and with lower anger control-in and anger control-out. The propensity to quickly interpret ambiguous faces as angry was associated with greater anger expression and its subcomponent of anger (...) expression-out and with lower anger control-out. Interactions between attention and interpretation biases did not contribute to the prediction of any anger component suggesting that attention and interpretation biases may function as distinct mechanisms. Theoretical and possible clinical implications are discussed. (shrink)

Personality and Cognitive Performance The two experiments reported here are concerned with the influence of trait anxiety and other individual differences on cognitive performance using the face-in-the-crowd procedure. Participants completed questionnaires and across two experiments searched for discrepant faces in matrices of otherwise identical faces. The key findings from this study indicated that anxiety enhanced processing efficiency of positive emotional material when interacts with high psychoticism. Additionally, the vigilance for threatening and neutral faces was a characteristic of sanguine individuals with (...) repressive coping while inefficient processing of threatening and neutral stimuli of non-defensive melancholic subjects. These results are discussed with reference to attentional control theory. (shrink)

Recent accounts on the global workspace theory suggest that consciousness involves transient formations of functional connections in thalamo-cortico-cortical networks. The level of connectivity in these networks is argued to determine the state of consciousness. Emotions are suggested to play a role in shaping consciousness, but their involvement in the global workspace theory remains elusive. In the present study, the role of emotion in the neural workspace theory of consciousness was scrutinized by investigating, whether unconscious and conscious display of emotional compared (...) to neutral facial expressions would differentially modulate EEG coherence. EEG coherence was measured by means of computing an average EEG coherence value between the frontal, parietal, and midline scalp sites. Objective awareness checks evidenced that conscious identification of the masked facial expressions was precluded. Analyses revealed reductions in EEG coherence in the lower frequency range for the masked as compared to unmasked neutral facial expressions. Crucially, a decline in EEG coherence was not observed for the emotional facial expressions. In other words, the level of EEG coherence did apparently vary as a function of awareness, but not when emotion was involved. The current finding suggests that EEG coherence is modulated by unconscious emotional processes, which extends common views on the global workspace architecture of consciousness. (shrink)

Recent accounts on the global workspace theory suggest that consciousness involves transient formations of functional connections in thalamo-cortico-cortical networks. The level of connectivity in these networks is argued to determine the state of consciousness. Emotions are suggested to play a role in shaping consciousness, but their involvement in the global workspace theory remains elusive. In the present study, the role of emotion in the neural workspace theory of consciousness was scrutinized by investigating, whether unconscious and conscious display of emotional compared (...) to neutral facial expressions would differentially modulate EEG coherence. EEG coherence was measured by means of computing an average EEG coherence value between the frontal, parietal, and midline scalp sites. Objective awareness checks evidenced that conscious identification of the masked facial expressions was precluded. Analyses revealed reductions in EEG coherence in the lower frequency range for the masked as compared to unmasked neutral facial expressions. Crucially, a decline in EEG coherence was not observed for the emotional facial expressions. In other words, the level of EEG coherence did apparently vary as a function of awareness, but not when emotion was involved. The current finding suggests that EEG coherence is modulated by unconscious emotional processes, which extends common views on the global workspace architecture of consciousness. (shrink)