Turning a blind eye: The struggle to inhibit attention towards unexpected negative emotions

Chalk, Philip T; Ormsby, Josef J.; Arnold, Derek Henry; Pegna, Alan J. · 2026 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.3758/s13415-026-01415-3

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Summary

This study investigates how expectations modulate the attentional capture and suppression of emotional facial expressions, specifically comparing fearful (threat-related) and happy faces. While the "threat capture hypothesis" posits that threatening stimuli automatically grab attention due to their survival value, prior research has yielded inconsistent behavioral results. The authors sought to determine whether the attentional priority of threat is contingent on whether the threat is expected or unexpected, using electrophysiological measures to detect subtle processing differences not visible in behavioral data. The researchers employed a visual search task with 28 participants who were instructed to locate a target face identified by a unique color border and discriminate its gender. On some trials, an irrelevant distractor face displaying either a fearful or happy expression appeared laterally. Crucially, participants were cued at the beginning of each block to expect either high-probability (75%) or low-probability (25%) occurrences of specific emotional distractors. The study measured lateralized event-related potentials (ERPs), specifically the distractor positivity (PD), which indexes the active suppression of distracting stimuli. This design allowed the authors to isolate the neural mechanisms of attentional filtering for expected versus unexpected emotional stimuli while controlling for basic visual features. Behavioral results showed that reaction times and accuracy were slower and lower, respectively, when any distractor was present compared to distractor-absent trials, but there were no significant differences between happy and fearful distractors, nor did expectations affect performance. However, ERP analysis revealed a distinct interaction. A significant PD was observed only for unexpected fearful faces. No PD was elicited by expected fearful faces, nor by happy faces regardless of expectation. This indicates that the brain actively suppresses attention to fearful expressions only when they are unexpected. When fearful faces were expected, or when happy faces were presented, no such suppression mechanism was engaged. These findings challenge the assumption that threat-related stimuli always hold high attentional priority. Instead, the results suggest that the attentional capture of threat is qualified by an individual’s expectations. Unexpected fearful faces possess sufficient relative saliency to require active suppression (indexed by the PD), whereas expected threats do not trigger this mechanism, likely because predictive coding allows for efficient resource allocation. This highlights the critical role of top-down expectations in modulating bottom-up emotional processing, suggesting that the "automaticity" of threat detection is not absolute but dependent on the informational value and predictability of the stimulus.

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• inattentional change blindness