AUTHOR=Zhou Xing , Du Bixuan , Wei Zhiqing , He Weiqi 

TITLE=Attention Capture of Non-target Emotional Faces: An Evidence From Reward Learning

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=Volume 10 - 2019

YEAR=2020

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.03004

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2019.03004

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=The aim of this study was to investigate whether emotional faces act as distracters and cause preferential processing during tests after reward learning. In the current study, using a visual search paradigm we examined how reward training affect emotion attention processing. The emotional face appeared as a task-irrelevant distracter during the test after reward learning, and participants were asked to judge the orientation of a line on the face. The results showed that when an emotional face appeared as a distracter after reward learning, the response to both happy and fearful faces under high-reward condition was significantly slower than the response under low-reward condition. The response to fearful face under high-reward and low-reward conditions was slower than the response to other emotions, but there was no significant difference between the response times to fearful face and neutral face under high-reward condition. The results reveal that reward learning has substantial influence on emotional attention processing, especially high reward weakens the processing advantage on fearful faces.