Attentional biases for emotional faces

Two studies investigated emotion-related biases in selective attention for pictorial stimuli in nonclinical subjects; the stimuli included threatening, happy and neutral facial expressions. The combined results showed evidence of an emotion-related attentional bias for facial expressions (i.e. an interaction effect of dysphoria and the emotional valence of the facial expression on attentional bias). In particular, nondysphoric subjects (i.e. those with low levels of anxiety and depression) showed an attentional bias away from threatening facial expressions, relative to neutral expressions. The dysphoric subjects did not show significant evidence of attentional biases for emotional stimuli.