Page 66 - Emotions through the eyes of our closest living relatives- Exploring attentional and behavioral mechanisms

Chapter 3
certain situations might become more prevalent or important. For instance, older and more experienced individuals might quickly see opportunities that children do not, like recognizing that someone is flirting. Similarly, children might detect other opportunities that adults fail to detect, such as recognizing playful intentions in potential play mates. Gender also influences the ability to detect emotional expressions. Specifically, biases toward threat tend to be larger in males than females, especially when they experienced violent environments (e.g., Kret & De Gelder, 2013; Shechner et al., 2012). In our earlier described study, gender or age differences did not modulate the observed attentional bias toward emotions (Kret et al., 2018). However, that study only included greyscale fearful and aggressive expressions of males and therefore this question needs to be investigated in an experiment including multiple emotions expressed by both genders. Whether attention is differentially captured depending on age or gender is part of what will be investigated in the current study.
The current study investigates how people perceive emotions from a large number of naturalistic scenes showing humans or bonobos. With rating scales, we gain insight into how participants perceive the observed images in terms of valence and arousal. Using dot-probe tasks, we address the question of which types of emotion scene capture attention most. Furthermore, using a large community sample allows us to unveil possible effects of age and gender.
Method
Participants
Participants consisted of a large group of visitors and employees of a Dutch zoo (Apenheul Primate Park, Apeldoorn, the Netherlands). The sample size was the result of a fixed number of days of testing agreed with the zoo. One part of the participants participated in a task assessing the perceived emotional valence and arousal of a series of stimuli, the other part in a dot-probe experiment. There were two reasons for deciding à priori to create separate groups for adults and children. First, children and adults took part in slightly different versions of the task: children did get trials with pictures showing bullying behavior, but no overt aggressive scenes and no sex scenes. Second, based on our experience with testing visitors in the zoo, we knew in advance that there would be relatively few 14–18 years old as most families visit with younger children and that age would not be normally distributed. Table 1 summarizes
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