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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2018

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

Résumé

The preferential selection of faces expressing negative emotions (such as fear or anger) is a recurrent finding in experimental psychology. This effect is often used as an argument for theories of emotion that consider 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 social information. 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-groups and/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 suggest here that emotional capture depends on the social group to which the expressive individual and the observer belong to. To address this issue, neutral and angry faces were presented as cues in a dot-probe task. Group membership was manipulated through the faces’ ethnicity (Caucasian or North-African), and did 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 towards the Caucasian and North-African groups were also measured. In opposition to the unconditional view of emotional 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 participants from 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 towards North-African people. Symmetrically, attentional capture by Caucasian angry faces was observed for the low-identified participants to the French group, or who held the most negative implicit attitudes towards French 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 less identified 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 studies indicated that low socioeconomic status (SES) individuals are more sensitive to their surroundings, and especially 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). We therefore assumed that low SES may have been responsible of the heightened vigilance observed for this 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.
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Dates et versions

hal-03168136 , version 1 (12-03-2021)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-03168136 , version 1

Citer

Quentin Victeur, Alice Normand, Delphine Martinot, Mickael Berthon, Pascal Huguet, et al.. Social conditionality of attentional capture by angry faces: The role of group attitudes and SES. 20th European Social Cognition Network Transfer of Knowledge Conference (ESCON 2018), SoCCCo; Université de Cologne, Sep 2018, Cologne, Germany. ⟨hal-03168136⟩
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