Gaze cueing elicited by emotional faces is influenced by affective context

Abstract

When we observe someone shift their gaze to a peripheral event or object, a corresponding shift in our own attention often follows. This social orienting response, joint attention, has been studied in the laboratory using the gaze cueing paradigm. Here, we investigate the combined influence of the emotional content displayed in two critical components of a joint attention episode: The facial expression of the cue face, and the affective nature of the to-be-localized target object. Hence, we presented participants with happy and disgusted faces as cueing stimuli, and neutral (Experiment 1), pleasant and unpleasant (Experiment 2) pictures as target stimuli. The findings demonstrate an effect of 'emotional context' confined to participants viewing pleasant pictures. Specifically, gaze cueing was boosted when the emotion of the gazing face (i.e., happy) matched that of the targets (pleasant). Demonstrating modulation by emotional context highlights the vital flexibility that a successful joint attention system requires in order to assist our navigation of the social world.

Figure 1.

Examples of the disgust and happy faces, alongside neutral, negative, and positive targets. Actual target codes from the IAPS are found in the Appendix. The stimuli shown here are copyright-free images that are similar to some of the targets we presented. To view this figure in colour, please see the online issue of the Journal.

Figure 2.

Illustration of the time course of stimulus presentation in an example trial. To view this figure in colour, please see the online issue of the Journal.

Figure 3.

Graphs illustrating the mean cueing effects (invalid minus valid) for each condition for Experiments 1 and 2. Error bars denote standard errors of the mean cueing effects.