Rapid detection and recognition of another individual’s emotional state plays
a pivotal role for humans and, most likely, other social species. Proper
reactions contribute to an individual’s survival in potentially dangerous
situations; this is ensured by a preferential attention towards salient cues.
The predisposition to attend to certain categories of affectively salient
stimuli– also referred to as affect-biased attention - is likely shared with
other species, since fast detection of and appropriate reaction to threats is
crucial to survival. We compared human children and one of our close
relatives, Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii), and predicted that both look
more attentively and longer at emotionally salient facial expressions of their
own and corresponding other species, compared to neutral faces. However, in
contrast to a bias towards emotions providing relevant information by
indicating a threat, both species preferentially looked at the fear-related,
but not the angry faces of humans and consistently preferred the silent-bared
teeth espressions in orangutans. The differential attention towards certain
expressions might derive from their social function and the need to detect a
potential threat in the environment. Our findings are consistent with claims
rooting this affect-biased attention characteristic of human perception in our
evolutionary history