Attentional bias to facial expressions of different emotions
- 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 andThe 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.…
Author details: | Cordelia Anna MühlenbeckORCiDGND, Carla PritschGND, Isabell WartenburgerORCiDGND, Silke Telkemeyer, Katja LiebalORCiDGND |
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DOI: | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00795 |
ISSN: | 1664-1078 |
Pubmed ID: | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32411056 |
Title of parent work (English): | Frontiers in psychology |
Subtitle (English): | a cross-cultural comparison of ≠Akhoe Hai||om and German children and adolescents |
Publisher: | Frontiers Research Foundation |
Place of publishing: | Lausanne |
Publication type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Date of first publication: | 2020/04/28 |
Publication year: | 2020 |
Release date: | 2023/10/02 |
Tag: | Germans; adolescents; attentional bias; cross-cultural comparison; emotions; facial expressions; fear bias; not equal Akhoe Hai parallel to om |
Volume: | 11 |
Article number: | 795 |
Number of pages: | 9 |
Funding institution: | Excellence Cluster EXC 302 Languages of Emotion [39932880]; Freie; Universitat Berlin within the Excellence Initiative of the German; Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG)German; Research Foundation (DFG) |
Organizational units: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften / Department Linguistik |
DDC classification: | 1 Philosophie und Psychologie / 15 Psychologie / 150 Psychologie |
4 Sprache / 41 Linguistik / 410 Linguistik | |
Peer review: | Referiert |
Publishing method: | Open Access / Gold Open-Access |
DOAJ gelistet | |
License (German): | CC-BY - Namensnennung 4.0 International |