TY  - JOUR
A1  - Mühlenbeck, Cordelia Anna
A1  - Pritsch, Carla
A1  - Wartenburger, Isabell
A1  - Telkemeyer, Silke
A1  - Liebal, Katja
T1  - Attentional bias to facial expressions of different emotions
BT  - a cross-cultural comparison of ≠Akhoe Hai||om and German children and adolescents
JF  - Frontiers in psychology
N2  - The attentional bias to negative information enables humans to quickly identify and to respond appropriately to potentially threatening situations. Because of its adaptive function, the enhanced sensitivity to negative information is expected to represent a universal trait, shared by all humans regardless of their cultural background. However, existing research focuses almost exclusively on humans from Western industrialized societies, who are not representative for the human species. Therefore, we compare humans from two distinct cultural contexts: adolescents and children from Germany, a Western industrialized society, and from the not equal Akhoe Hai parallel to om, semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers in Namibia. We predicted that both groups show an attentional bias toward negative facial expressions as compared to neutral or positive faces. We used eye-tracking to measure their fixation duration on facial expressions depicting different emotions, including negative (fear, anger), positive (happy), and neutral faces. Both Germans and the not equal Akhoe Hai parallel to om gazed longer at fearful faces, but shorter on angry faces, challenging the notion of a general bias toward negative emotions. For happy faces, fixation durations varied between the two groups, suggesting more flexibility in the response to positive emotions. Our findings emphasize the need for placing research on emotion perception into an evolutionary, cross-cultural comparative framework that considers the adaptive significance of specific emotions, rather than differentiating between positive and negative information, and enables systematic comparisons across participants from diverse cultural backgrounds.
KW  - attentional bias
KW  - fear bias
KW  - emotions
KW  - facial expressions
KW  - cross-cultural comparison
KW  - not equal Akhoe Hai parallel to om
KW  - Germans
KW  - adolescents
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00795
SN  - 1664-1078
VL  - 11
PB  - Frontiers Research Foundation
CY  - Lausanne
ER  -