Social processing modulates the initial allocation of attention towards angry faces: evidence from the N2pc component

Abstract

Previous research has shown that attentional bias towards angry faces is moderated by the activation of a social processing mode. More specifically, reliable cueing effects for angry face cues in the dot-probe task only occurred when participants performed a task that required social processing of the target stimuli. However, cueing effects are a rather distal measure of covert shifts in spatial attention. Thus, it remains unclear whether the social processing mode modulates initial allocation of attention to or attentional disengagement from angry faces. In the present study, we used the N2pc, an event-related potential component, as an index of attentional shifts towards angry faces. Participants performed a dot-probe task with two different target conditions while the electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded. In the social target condition, target stimuli were socially meaningful (schematic faces), and in the non-social target condition, they were meaningless (scrambled schematic faces). The amplitude of the N2pc component elicited by angry face cues was significantly larger in the social target condition than in the non-social target condition. This pattern also occurred for behavioural cueing effects. These results suggest that the activation of a social processing mode due to current task demands affects the initial allocation of attention towards angry faces.

Keywords: N2pc component; angry faces; attentional bias; dot-probe task; social processing.

Fig. 1.

Illustration of a typical trial and the design of the experiment. For the sake of visibility, proportions are not true to scale.

Fig. 2.

Average cueing scores for social target and non-social target trials. Cueing scores represent the difference between the average reaction times to invalidly cued trials and validly cued trials (error bars depict the 95% confidence interval).

Fig. 3.

Grand-average ERPs measured at electrode sites PO9 and PO10 contralateral and ipsilateral to the location of the angry face cue, separately for the social target condition (top panel) and the non-social target condition (mid panel). The difference between contralateral and ipsilateral waveforms (bottom panel) in the 180–300 ms interval after the cue onset is larger in the social target condition than in the non-social target condition. For the sake of visual clarity, difference waveforms were smoothed using a non-causal Butterworth low-pass filter (half-amplitude cut-off = 20 Hz, slope = 24 dB/octave).

Fig. 4.

Average N2pc amplitudes for social target and non-social target trials. N2pc amplitudes reflect the difference in electric potential obtained by subtracting ERPs ipsilateral to the angry face cue from ERPs contralateral to the angry face cue (error bars depict the 95% confidence interval).