Social conditionality of attentional capture by angry faces: The role of group attitudes and SES

Abstract

International audienceThe preferential selection of faces expressing negative emotions (such as fear or anger) is a recurrentfinding in experimental psychology. This effect is often used as an argument for theories of emotion thatconsider the selection of threat-related stimuli as an automatic and unconditional process. However,faces belong to a particular class of threat-related stimuli, since they are also important sources of socialinformation. This allows individuals to rapidly categorize people in different groups, and thus to differentiate efficiently “the friends from the foes”. Several studies have already demonstrated that this categorization process may impact cognition and behavior, with a general tendency to favor in-groupsand/or discriminate out-groups. We do not know whether and how this intergroup bias modulates attentional capture by faces expressing negative emotions. Rather than being fully automatic, we suggesthere that emotional capture depends on the social group to which the expressive individual and theobserver belong to. To address this issue, neutral and angry faces were presented as cues in a dot-probetask. Group membership was manipulated through the faces’ ethnicity (Caucasian or North-African), anddid or did not match the French participants’ ethnic group (study 1: Caucasian, study 2: North-African).Participants’ identification with the French group, as well as their implicit and explicit attitudes towardsthe Caucasian and North-African groups were also measured. In opposition to the unconditional view ofemotional selection, no attentional capture by angry faces was observed for Caucasian participants(study 1). In sharp contrast, a strong attentional capture by angry faces was observed for participantsfrom the North-African ethnic group (study 2). Importantly, this effect was modulated by the face’s ethnicity and group attitudes. Attentional capture by North-African angry faces was observed for highlyidentified participants to the French group, or who held the most negative implicit attitudes towardsNorth-African people. Symmetrically, attentional capture by Caucasian angry faces was observed for thelow-identified participants to the French group, or who held the most negative implicit attitudes towardsFrench people. Therefore, these new results suggest that intergroup bias can modulate attentional capture by negative faces, especially angry faces of the devalued group (the group the participants were lessidentified with, or held the most negative implicit attitudes to). Nonetheless, these effects were observed exclusively for participants from the North-African ethnic group. For that matter, previous studiesindicated that low socioeconomic status (SES) individuals are more sensitive to their surroundings, andespecially to potential threats in their environment, compared to high SES individuals. As it happens,belonging to the North-African ethnic group is also commonly associated with lower SES (in France). Wetherefore assumed that low SES may have been responsible of the heightened vigilance observed forthis group of participants. In order to test this hypothesis, a replication of the study with Caucasian participants including a measure of their objective SES is being carried out