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The attraction of emotions: Irrelevant emotional information modulates motor actions
Ambron, Elisabetta Foroni, Francesco
Ambron, Elisabetta
Foroni, Francesco
Abstract
Emotional expressions are important cues that capture our attention automatically. Although a wide range of work has explored the role and influence of emotions on cognition and behavior, little is known about the way that emotions influence motor actions. Moreover, considering how critical detecting emotional facial expressions in the environment can be, it is important to understand their impact even when they are not directly relevant to the task being performed. Our novel approach was to explore this issue from the attention-and-action perspective, using a task-irrelevant distractor paradigm in which participants are asked to reach for a target while a nontarget stimulus is also presented. We tested whether the movement trajectory would be influenced by irrelevant stimuli—faces with or without emotional expressions. The results showed that reaching paths veered toward faces with emotional expressions, in particular happiness, but not toward neutral expressions. This reinforces the view of emotions as attention-capturing stimuli that are, however, also potential sources of distraction for motor actions.
Keywords
reaching movements, distractor effect, emotional faces, happy face, angry face
Date
2014
Type
Journal article
Journal
Psychonomic Bulletin and Review
Book
Volume
22
Issue
4
Page Range
1117-1123
Article Number
ACU Department
School of Behavioural and Health Sciences
Faculty of Health Sciences
Faculty of Health Sciences
Relation URI
Source URL
Event URL
Open Access Status
License
File Access
Controlled