Pick on someone your own size: the detection of threatening facial expressions posed by both child and adult models.

For decades, researchers have documented a bias for the rapid detection of angry faces in adult, child, and even infant participants. However, despite the age of the participant, the facial stimuli used in all of these experiments were schematic drawings or photographs of adult faces. The current research is the first to examine the detection of both child and adult emotional facial expressions. In our study, 3- to 5-year-old children and adults detected angry, sad, and happy faces among neutral distracters. The depicted faces were of adults or of other children. As in previous work, children detected angry faces more quickly than happy and neutral faces overall, and they tended to detect the faces of other children more quickly than the faces of adults. Adults also detected angry faces more quickly than happy and sad faces even when the faces depicted child models. The results are discussed in terms of theoretical implications for the development of a bias for threat in detection.

The snake in the grass revisited: an experimental comparison of threat detection paradigms.

The current investigation compares the results of two commonly used visual detection paradigms-the standard adult button-press detection paradigm used in Öhman, Flykt, and Esteves (2001), and the new child-friendly touch-screen detection paradigm used in LoBue and DeLoache (2008)-within the same samples of adult participants. Results suggest that both paradigms produce the same pattern of findings with regard to detection latency for threat-relevant versus threat-irrelevant stimuli: Adults detected threat-relevant targets more quickly than threat-irrelevant targets across the varying procedures. However, results with respect to automaticity of detection as suggested by Öhman et al. (2001) were only replicated with the classic button-press paradigm. The findings validate the touch-screen visual search procedure and have important implications for choosing an appropriate methodology for studying threat detection.

What accounts for the rapid detection of threat? Evidence for an advantage in perceptual and behavioral responding from eye movements.

Countless studies have reported that adults detect a variety of threatening stimuli more quickly than positive or neutral stimuli. Despite speculation about what factors drive this bias in detection, very few studies have examined the exact search strategies adults use to detect threatening stimuli in visual search. The current research uses an eye-tracker in a classic visual search paradigm in attempt to elucidate the factors that lead to rapid threat detection. Our results replicate previous work, demonstrating that adults detect threatening targets (snakes and spiders) more quickly and accurately than nonthreatening targets (flowers and mushrooms). Results from the eye-tracker extend these findings, suggesting that the bias for threat in detection tasks is driven by both an advantage in perception, or bottom up processing (faster fixations to threats vs. nonthreats), and an advantage in behavioral responding, or top down processing (faster behavioral responding to threats once a target is first fixated). Together, the results present a more complete picture of the mechanisms that drive rapid threat detection, suggesting that multiple factors can lead to an advantage for threat in visual search.