Citation

Hahn S, Carlson C, Singer S, Gronlund SD. Acta Psychol. 2006; 123(3): 312-336.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, University of Oklahoma, 455 West Lindsey St., Norman, OK 73019, USA. sowon@ou.edu

Copyright

(Copyright © 2006, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.actpsy.2006.01.008

PMID

16524554

Abstract

Using a visual search paradigm, we investigated how age affected attentional bias to emotional facial expressions. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants searched for a discrepant facial expression in a matrix of otherwise homogeneous faces. Both younger and older adults showed a more effective search when the discrepant face was angry rather than happy or neutral. However, when the angry faces served as non-target distractors, younger adults' search was less effective than happy or neutral distractor conditions. In contrast, older adults showed a more efficient search with angry distractors than happy or neutral distractors, indicating that older adults were better able to inhibit angry facial expressions. In Experiment 3, we found that even a top-down search goal could not override the angry face superiority effect in guiding attention. In addition, RT distribution analyses supported that both younger and older adults performed the top-down angry face search qualitatively differently from the top-down happy face search. The current research indicates that threat face processing involves automatic attentional shift and a controlled attentional process. The current results suggest that age only influenced the controlled attentional process.

Language: en