The face in the crowd revisited: A threat advantage with schematic stimuli.

TLDR

The study tested whether humans preferentially orient attention toward schematic threatening faces. Participants performed a visual search task, locating a discrepant face among identical faces in a matrix. Across five experiments, threatening faces were detected faster and more accurately than friendly or other negative faces, and this threat advantage persisted under parallel or serial search, with neutral or emotional distractors, and even for inverted faces.

Abstract

Schematic threatening, friendly, and neutral faces were used to test the hypothesis that humans preferentially orient their attention toward threat. Using a visual search paradigm, participants searched for discrepant faces in matrices of otherwise identical faces. Across 5 experiments, results consistently showed faster and more accurate detection of threatening than friendly targets. The threat advantage was obvious regardless of whether the conditions favored parallel or serial search (i.e., involved neutral or emotional distractors), and it was valid for inverted faces. Threatening angry faces were more quickly and accurately detected than were other negative faces (sad or "scheming"), which suggests that the threat advantage can be attributed to threat rather than to the negative valence or the uniqueness of the target display.