Emotional faces capture spatial attention in 5-year-old children

Original article:

Emotional faces capture spatial attention in 5-year-old children

Evolutionary Psychology 8(4): 754-767 Kit K. Elam, Centre for Research on Children and Families, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, kitelam@gmail.comJoshua M. Carlson, Department of Biomedical Engineering, State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY, USALisabeth F. DiLalla, Department of Family and Community Medicine, Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, Carbondale, IL, USAKaren S. Reinke, Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Springfield, Springfield, IL, USA

Abstract

Emotional facial expressions are important social cues that convey salient affective information. Infants, younger children, and adults all appear to orient spatial attention to emotional faces with a particularly strong bias to fearful faces. Yet in young children it is unclear whether or not both happy and fearful faces extract attention. Given that the processing of emotional faces is believed by some to serve an evolutionarily adaptive purpose, attentional biases to both fearful and happy expressions would be expected in younger children. However, the extent to which this ability is present in young children and whether or not this ability is genetically mediated is untested. Therefore, the aims of the current study were to assess the spatial-attentional properties of emotional faces in young children, with a preliminary test of whether this effect was influenced by genetics. Five-year-old twin pairs performed a dot-probe task. The results suggest that children preferentially direct spatial attention to emotional faces, particularly right visual field faces. The results provide support for the notion that the direction of spatial attention to emotional faces serves an evolutionarily adaptive function and may be mediated by genetic mechanisms.

Keywords

child, facial expressions, spatial attention, emotion, behavior genetics

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