Abstract

Whether angry faces are superior to happy faces has been fiercely debated, but it is still difficult to reconcile the literature as previous studies yielded mixed results. For example, angry faces appear to attract more attention resulting in faster reaction times (RTs) and the shallow search slope in a visual search paradigm. However, this high-level account has been questioned by a low-level account claiming that this result is due to low-level visual saliency (e.g., higher contrast between face and teeth color). In the present study, we seek to reconcile the discrepancy between mixed results by manipulating both facial expressions and face-teeth contrast. Specifically, we measured attention effects in both the visual search and cueing paradigms and aimed to tease apart high-level, emotion effects from low-level effects. In the visual search experiment, we found that RTs were faster for angry faces compared to happy faces. Furthermore, faces with higher face-teeth contrast yielded faster RTs compared to faces with lower face-teeth contrast. Critically, there was an interaction between face-teeth contrast and emotion, suggesting that emotion may affect target processing on top of low-level effects during visual search. In the visual cueing experiment, we found that angry faces but not faces with higher face-teeth contrast did capture attention despite being task-irrelevant, bolstering the role of emotion in attention capture. Overall, our findings support the anger superiority effect and suggest the need for a comprehensive model combining emotion and visual features to explain the effect of facial expressions on visual attention.