Attentional Bias in Humans Toward Human and Bonobo Expressions of Emotion

Correctly recognizing and efficiently attending to emotional situations are highly valuable skills for social species such as humans and bonobos, humans' closest living relatives. In the current study, we investigated whether humans perceive a range of emotional situations differently when these involved other humans compared to bonobos. A large group of children and adults participated in an emotion perception task and rated scenes showing either bonobos or humans in situations depicting distressed or aggressive behavior, yawning, scratching, grooming, playing, sex scenes or neutral situations. A new group of people performed a dot-probe task to assess attentional biases toward these materials. The main finding is that humans perceive emotional scenes showing people similarly as emotional scenes of bonobos, a result reflecting a shared evolutionary origin of emotional expressions. Other results show that children interpreted bonobos’ bared teeth displays as a positive signal. This signal is related to the human smile, but is frequently seen in distressed situations, as was the case in the current experiment. Children may still need to learn to use contextual cues when judging an ambiguous expression as positive or negative. Further, the sex scenes were rated very positively, especially by male participants. Even though they rated these more positively than women, their attention was captured similarly, surpassing all other emotion categories. Finally, humans’ attention was captured more by human yawns than by bonobo yawns, which may be related to the highly contagious nature of yawns, especially when shown by close others. The current research adds to earlier work showing morphological, behavioral and genetic parallels between humans and bonobos by showing that their emotional expressions have a common origin too.

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Effects of SSRI Antidepressants on Attentional Bias toward Emotional Scenes in First-Episode Depressive Patients: Evidence from an Eye-Tracking Study

Psychiatry Investigation ◽

10.30773/pi.2019.0345 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 17 (9) ◽

pp. 871-879 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Lei Zhang ◽

Fengqiong Yu ◽

Qian Hu ◽

Yuxi Qiao ◽

Rongrong Xuan ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Eye Tracking ◽

Attentional Bias ◽

First Episode ◽

Attentional Biases ◽

Control Group ◽

Negative Images ◽

Positive Images ◽

Depressive Patients ◽

Ssri Treatment ◽

Emotional Scenes

Objective Attentional biases toward emotional scenes may represent vulnerability and maintenance factors in depression. Antidepressant therapy may improve cognitive function and reduce depression, and is considered as the mechanism of action of antidepressants. Therefore, we conducted an eye-tracking test to examine whether selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants can reduce negative attentional biases and elicit clinical responses in depression.Methods Twenty first-episode depressive patients freely viewed three types of pictures that depicted different emotional scenes (i.e., positive-control, neutral-control, and negative-control) for 4,000 ms while their eye movements were monitored. The attentional bias to different emotional scenes was assessed before and after eight weeks of SSRI treatment using the eye-tracking method. The control group included a group of healthy individuals.Results The results revealed that first-episode depressive patients oriented their gaze more frequently to negative images and less to happy images, compared to controls. Importantly, the attentional bias in depressive patients was regulated after eight weeks of SSRI treatment. Patients showed an increased tendency to fixate on positive images and a decreased tendency to focus on negative images.Conclusion This suggests that SSRI antidepressants decrease vulnerability to negative images, while having an effect on attention in respect to positive images.

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Attentional bias following frustration in youth with psychopathic traits

Journal of Experimental Psychopathology ◽

10.5127/jep.060116 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 9 (2) ◽

pp. jep.060116 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

David S. Kosson ◽

Cami K. McBride ◽

Steven A. Miller ◽

Nastassia R. E. Riser ◽

Lindsay A. Whitman

Keyword(s):

Attentional Bias ◽

Psychopathic Traits ◽

Attentional Biases ◽

Negative Experiences ◽

Male And Female ◽

Affective Stimuli ◽

Probe Task ◽

Affective Cues ◽

Affective Experiences ◽

The Impact

The emotional deficit perspective predicts that youth with psychopathic traits are relatively unresponsive to negative affective cues and display smaller attentional biases for affective stimuli following negative experiences than youth without psychopathic traits. In contrast, because the negative preception hypothesis predicts that youth with psychopathic traits learn to tune out negative affective experiences, it predicts that such youth exhibit greater attentional biases away from sadness-related stimuli following negative experiences than youth without psychopathic traits, and that these biases increase with age. This study was designed to test the conflicting predictions of the emotional deficit perspective and the negative preception hypothesis by administering an affective dot probe task to 135 male and female detained adolescents (13.06 to 17.62 years of age) following a frustration experience. Analyses showed that age moderated the impact of psychopathic traits: as age increased, higher levels of the affective-interpersonal component of psychopathy were associated with increasing attentional bias away from both sadness-related and happiness-related stimuli. These findings provide initial evidence corroborating the negative preception hypothesis in youth with psychopathic traits.

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Attention Towards Emotions is Modulated by Familiarity with the Expressor. A Comparison Between Bonobos and Humans

10.1101/2020.05.11.089813 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Evy van Berlo ◽

Thomas Bionda ◽

Mariska E. Kret

Keyword(s):

Attentional Bias ◽

Common Ancestor ◽

Community Sample ◽

The Other ◽

Emotional Expressions ◽

Last Common Ancestor ◽

Human Attention ◽

The One ◽

Sample Experiment ◽

Emotional Scenes

AbstractWhy can humans be intolerant of, yet also be empathetic towards strangers? This cardinal question has rarely been studied in our closest living relatives, bonobos. Yet, their striking xenophilic tendencies make them an interesting model for reconstructing the socio-emotional capacities of the last common ancestor of hominids. Within a series of dot-probe experiments, we compared bonobos’ and humans’ attention towards scenes depicting familiar (kith and kin) or unfamiliar individuals with emotional or neutral expressions. Results show that attention of bonobos is immediately captured by emotional scenes depicting unfamiliar bonobos, but not by emotional groupmates (Experiment 1) or expressions of humans, irrespective of familiarity (Experiment 2). Using a large community sample, Experiment 3 shows that human attention is mostly captured by emotional rather than neutral expressions of family and friends. On the one hand, our results show that an attentional bias towards emotions is a shared phenomenon between humans and bonobos, but on the other, that both species have their own unique evolutionarily informed bias. These findings support previously proposed adaptive explanations for xenophilia in bonobos which potentially biases them towards emotional expressions of unfamiliar conspecifics, and parochialism in humans, which makes them sensitive to the emotional expressions of close others.

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Different Patterns of Attention Bias in Worry and Rumination

10.31234/osf.io/vxyb7 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Juyoen Hur ◽

Kelly Gaul ◽

Howard Berenbaum

Keyword(s):

College Student ◽

Attentional Bias ◽

Ecological Momentary Assessment ◽

Measurement Methods ◽

Attentional Biases ◽

Probe Task ◽

Ecological Momentary ◽

The Relationship ◽

Momentary Assessment ◽

Laboratory Measures

In two studies with college student participants, we explored the ways in which worry and rumination may be similar or distinct. Towards that end, as part of our research, we developed new laboratory measures of worry and rumination. In Study 1, we examined how the new lab instruments we developed differentiate worry vs. rumination and initiation vs. termination. We did so by comparing them with two other measurement methods of worry and rumination, ecological momentary assessment and questionnaires. We found that the laboratory measures were reasonably able to differentiate worry from rumination, but not initiation from termination. In Study 2, we further examined the relationship between attentional biases to threat/danger and loss/failure (using the dot probe task) and both worry and rumination to explore the nature of distinctions between worry and rumination. We found different patterns of attentional bias associated with worry and rumination. Worry was associated with bias away from threat. In contrast, rumination was associated with bias toward loss/failure. The results of the two studies suggest that there are some meaningful differences between worry and rumination. The implications of the current findings are discussed.

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Predictive attentional bias modification induces stimulus-evoked attentional bias for threat

Europe’s Journal of Psychology ◽

10.5964/ejop.v15i3.1633 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 15 (3) ◽

pp. 479-490 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Thomas E. Gladwin ◽

Martin Möbius ◽

Eni S. Becker

Keyword(s):

Attentional Bias ◽

Attentional Biases ◽

Cognitive Response ◽

Attentional Bias Modification ◽

Stimulus Response ◽

Probe Task ◽

Visual Probe ◽

Significant Difference ◽

Primary Test ◽

Bias Modification

Attentional Bias Modification (ABM) aims to modulate attentional biases, but questions remain about its efficacy and there may be new variants yet to explore. The current study tested effects of a novel version of ABM, predictive ABM (predABM), using visually neutral cues predicting the locations of future threatening and neutral stimuli that had a chance of appearing after a delay. Such effects could also help understand anticipatory attentional biases measured using cued Visual Probe Tasks. One hundred and two participants completed the experiment online. We tested whether training Towards Threat versus Away from Threat contingencies on the predABM would cause subsequent attentional biases towards versus away from threat versus neutral stimuli, respectively. Participants were randomly assigned and compared on attentional bias measured via a post-training Dot-Probe task. A significant difference was found between the attentional bias in the Towards Threat versus Away from Threat group. The training contingencies induced effects on bias in the expected direction, although the bias in each group separately did not reach significance. Stronger effects may require multiple training sessions. Nevertheless, the primary test confirmed the hypothesis, showing that the predABM is a potentially interesting variant of ABM. Theoretically, the results show that automatization may involve the process of selecting the outcome of a cognitive response, rather than a simple stimulus-response association. Training based on contingencies involving predicted stimuli affect subsequent attentional measures and could be of interest in future clinical studies.

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A Pictorial Dot Probe Task to Assess Food-Related Attentional Bias in Youth With and Without Obesity: Overview of Indices and Evaluation of Their Reliability

Frontiers in Psychology ◽

10.3389/fpsyg.2021.644512 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 12 ◽

Author(s):

Leentje Vervoort ◽

Maya Braun ◽

Maarten De Schryver ◽

Tiffany Naets ◽

Ernst H. W. Koster ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Attentional Bias ◽

Response Speed ◽

Attentional Biases ◽

Dot Probe ◽

Significant Group ◽

Attentional Processes ◽

Bias Score ◽

Probe Task ◽

Cast Doubt ◽

General Response

Several versions of the dot probe detection task are frequently used to assess maladaptive attentional processes associated with a broad range of psychopathology and health behavior, including eating behavior and weight. However, there are serious concerns about the reliability of the indices derived from the paradigm as measurement of attentional bias toward or away from salient stimuli. The present paper gives an overview of different attentional bias indices used in psychopathology research and scrutinizes three types of indices (the traditional attentional bias score, the dynamic trial-level base scores, and the probability index) calculated from a pictorial version of the dot probe task to assess food-related attentional biases in children and youngsters with and without obesity. Correlational analyses reveal that dynamic scores (but not the traditional and probability indices) are dependent on general response speed. Reliability estimates are low for the traditional and probability indices. The higher reliability for the dynamic indices is at least partially explained by general response speed. No significant group differences between youth with and without obesity are found, and correlations with weight are also non-significant. Taken together, results cast doubt on the applicability of this specific task for both experimental and individual differences research on food-related attentional biases in youth. However, researchers are encouraged to make and test adaptations to the procedure or computational algorithm in an effort to increase psychometric quality of the task and to report psychometric characteristics of their version of the task for their specific sample.

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Visual disgust-elicitors produce an attentional blink independent of contextual and trait-level pathogen avoidance

10.31234/osf.io/qa8r4 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Paola Perone ◽

David Vaughn Becker ◽

Joshua M. Tybur

Keyword(s):

Individual Differences ◽

Visual Attention ◽

Attentional Blink ◽

Attentional Bias ◽

Visual Stimuli ◽

Attentional Biases ◽

Attentional Processing ◽

Trait Level ◽

Task Irrelevant ◽

Pathogen Avoidance

Multiple studies report that disgust-eliciting stimuli are perceived as salient and subsequently capture selective attention. In the current study, we aimed to better understand the nature of temporal attentional biases toward disgust-eliciting stimuli and to investigate the extent to which these biases are sensitive to contextual and trait-level pathogen avoidance motives. Participants (N=116) performed in an Emotional Attentional Blink (EAB) task in which task-irrelevant disgust-eliciting, fear-eliciting, or neutral images preceded a target by 200, 500, or 800 milliseconds (i.e., lag two, five and eight respectively). They did so twice - once while not exposed to an odor, and once while exposed to either an odor that elicited disgust or an odor that did not - and completed a measure of disgust sensitivity. Results indicate that disgust-eliciting visual stimuli produced a greater attentional blink than neutral visual stimuli at lag two and a greater attentional blink than fear-eliciting visual stimuli at both lag two and at lag five. Neither the odor manipulations nor individual differences measures moderated this effect. We propose that visual attention is engaged for a longer period of time following disgust-eliciting stimuli because covert processes automatically initiate the evaluation of pathogen threats. The fact that state and trait pathogen avoidance do not influence this temporal attentional bias suggests that early attentional processing of pathogen cues is initiated independent from the context in which such cues are perceived.

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Newborns’ sensitivity to speed changes as a building block for animacy perception

Scientific Reports ◽

10.1038/s41598-020-79451-3 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 11 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Elisa Di Giorgio ◽

Marco Lunghi ◽

Giorgio Vallortigara ◽

Francesca Simion

Keyword(s):

Attentional Bias ◽

Building Block ◽

Visual Cues ◽

Constant Speed ◽

Attentional Biases ◽

Visual Preference ◽

Reverse Sequence ◽

Motion Speed ◽

Speed Change ◽

First Time

AbstractThe human visual system can discriminate between animate beings vs. inanimate objects on the basis of some kinematic cues, such as starting from rest and speed changes by self-propulsion. The ontogenetic origin of such capability is still under debate. Here we investigate for the first time whether newborns manifest an attentional bias toward objects that abruptly change their speed along a trajectory as contrasted with objects that move at a constant speed. To this end, we systematically manipulated the motion speed of two objects. An object that moves with a constant speed was contrasted with an object that suddenly increases (Experiment 1) or with one that suddenly decreases its speed (Experiment 2). When presented with a single speed change, newborns did not show any visual preference. However, newborns preferred an object that abruptly increases and then decreases its speed (Experiment 3), but they did not show any visual preference for the reverse sequence pattern (Experiment 4). Overall, results are discussed in line with the hypothesis of the existence of attentional biases in newborns that trigger their attention towards some visual cues of motion that characterized animate perception in adults.

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