Page 54 - Emotions through the eyes of our closest living relatives- Exploring attentional and behavioral mechanisms

Chapter 2
Discussion
In Experiment 3 using a large community sample, we show that human attention is modulated by the emotional expressions of family members and friends. Traditionally, emotional attention is studied using stimuli that depict unfamiliar individuals only. For the first time, we show that familiarity with the expressor in terms of their social or familial relationship differentially affects immediate attention for emotions in humans. Humans have strong affinity with their own social group and often choose to associate with others who are similar to themselves in some respect (Brewer, 1979). This tendency to focus on one’s ingroup is likely to be adaptive, as it bolsters cooperation between individuals within the same group, which subsequently provides protection from danger such as competitors (Bowles, 2009). As such, our results contribute to the existing literature by showing that intergroup bias likely already presents itself early on in social perception, and guiding attention to emotions of socially close others.
Interestingly, we did not find evidence for an attention bias towards emotions of unfamiliar individuals, even though this is commonly reported in the literature (Van Rooijen et al., 2017). Importantly, our control experiment as part of Experiment 2 showed that when all individuals on the stimuli are unfamiliar to the participants, an attentional bias towards emotions arises. Thus, it is possible that the presence of familiar individuals within the same experiment dampens the focus of attention on emotional expressions of unfamiliar others (and, for bonobos in Experiment 1, the reverse might be true). The social relevance of the stimuli may thus interact with detecting emotional expressions, prompting stronger activation of attentional and emotional brain mechanisms than when viewing emotions of less-relevant others. Indeed, according to appraisal theory (e.g., Lazarus, 2001), the social relevance of stimuli to the observer likely impacts attentional mechanisms (Wirth & Wentura, 2019). One example of this is that an attentional bias towards threatening stimuli such as angry faces is more pronounced in people with high anxiety compared to individuals with low anxiety, and sometimes not even observed in non-anxious people (Bar- Haim et al., 2007). As the relevance of stimuli can be determined by a range of factors including personal goals, values, and needs (Brosch et al., 2008; Pool et al., 2016), it could be interesting to explore these factors and how they affect attention in more detail in a comparative framework.
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