RESUMEN
While our direct observations of the features or behaviours of the stimuli around us tell us much about them (e.g., should they be feared?), the origin of much of our knowledge is often untethered from directly observable properties (e.g., through what we have learned or have been told about them, or "semantic knowledge"). Here, we ask whether otherwise neutral visual stimuli that participants learn to associate with emotional qualities in the lab cause the stimuli to be attended in a similar way as stimuli whose emotional qualities can be discerned through their visual properties. In Experiment 1, participants learned to associate negative or neutral characteristics with neutral faces, which then served as valid or invalid spatial cues to targets in an attentional disengagement paradigm. The performance of participants higher in trait anxiety was consistent with attentional avoidance of faces with learned negative associations, while participants lower in trait anxiety showed a general response slowing in trials with these stimuli, compared to those with neutral associations. In contrast, in Experiment 2, using (visually) expressive (angry) faces, the performance of participants higher in trait anxiety was consistent with difficulty disengaging from visually threatening faces, while the performance of those with lower trait anxiety appeared unaffected by the valence of the stimuli. These findings suggest that (1) emotionality acquired indirectly via learned semantic knowledge impacts how attention is allocated to face stimuli, and this impact is influenced by trait anxiety, and (2) there are differences in the effects of stimulus emotionality depending on whether it is acquired indirectly or directly via the perceptual features of the stimulus. These differences are discussed in the context of the variability of attention bias effects reported in the literature and the time course of impacts of emotionality on stimulus processing.
RESUMEN
It is one thing for everyday phrases like "seeing red" to link some emotions with certain colours (e.g., anger with red), but can such links measurably bias information processing? We investigated whether emotional face information (angry/happy/neutral) held in visual working memory (VWM) enhances memory for shapes presented in a conceptually consistent colour (red or green) (Experiment 1). Although emotional information held in VWM appeared not to bias memory for coloured shapes in Experiment 1, exploratory analyses suggested that participants who physically mimicked the face stimuli were better at remembering congruently coloured shapes. Experiment 2 confirmed this finding by asking participants to hold the faces in mind while either mimicking or labelling the emotional expressions of face stimuli. Once again, those who mimicked the expressions were better at remembering shapes with emotion-congruent colours, whereas those who simply labelled them were not. Thus, emotion-colour associations appear powerful enough to guide attention, but-consistent with proposed impacts of "embodied emotion" on cognition-such effects emerged when emotion processing was facilitated through facial mimicry.