Negative and Positive Bias for Emotional Faces: Evidence from the Attention and Working Memory Paradigms

Figure 1

Illustration of a visual search paradigm. Participants needed to detect whether one face differed from the other faces. The letter F denotes a face in the search array. Usually, in half of the trials, all faces show the same expression, while in the other half of the trials, one face shows a different expression from the other faces. The trials containing different kinds of expressions (as presented in panels (a)–(d)) have usually occurred in four versions: (a) one positive face with a neutral face background (P: positive face; Ne: neutral face); (b) one negative face with a neutral face background (N: negative face; Ne: neutral face); (c) one positive face with a negative background (P: positive face; N: negative face); (d) one negative face with a positive background (N: negative face; P: positive face). Note that the set size in each search array can differ across studies. Negative face: angry, fearful, sad, or disgusted expression face; positive face: happy expression face; neutral face: neutral expression face.