Do We Really Pay More Attention to Emotional Faces? A Review of 20 Years of Research

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This study provides clarity on a long-standing debate about attention and emotion. While many believe that emotional faces always “grab” our attention, our combined review shows that the real effects are near zero. These insights can help guide future research and practical applications in diverse areas—from clinical psychology to user experience (UX) design. Deeper questions remain like if there is in-fact attention bias when the face stimuli in question have greater ecological validity (than a stale lab environment procedure). It is a difficult task to simultaneously control for perceptual confounds and utilize realistic, embedded portrayals of emotion. Perhaps the context surrounding the emotion expression is in-fact more critical than the expression itself? Some studies show that is the case. What is truly conveyed by a prototypical, static image of a facial expression of a cardinal emotion (e.g., anger, happiness)? Can the internal affective state of a human be accurately communicated in this way? Recent studies question the basic emotion and the standard hypothesis. We know there are many types of expressions, but we have little research on what each truly represents about a person. How might researchers leverage new behavioral experiments and analysis techniques of their data to better extract the underlying constructs they wish to measure? This review examines within subject designs where response time differences between conditions are the primary dependent variable. Researchers must collect a sample size of 100+ in order to study the same phenomenon, yet that is unreasonable for most labs. The answer to this issue likely comes from the community accepting alternative methods and procedures to tap into and measure the phenomenon of attention bias.

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