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Cited by 211Face Recognition and PerceptionNeural and Behavioral Psychology StudiesEvolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior

Facial expression and selective attention

Vuilleumier, Patrik·2002·Current Opinion in Psychiatry
DOI 10.1097/00001504-200205000-00011
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Abstract

Recent findings demonstrate that faces with an emotional expression tend to attract attention more than neutral faces, especially when having some threat-related value (anger or fear). These findings suggest that discrimination of emotional cues in faces can at least partly be extracted at preattentive or unconscious stages of processing, and then serve to enhance awareness and behavioural responses toward emotionally relevant stimuli. Functional neuroimaging results have begun to delineate brain regions whose response to threat-related expressions is independent of voluntary attention (e.g. amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex), and other regions whose response occurs only with attention (e.g. superior temporal and anterior cingulate cortex). Moreover, visual responses in the fusiform cortex are enhanced for emotional faces, consistent with their greater perceptual saliency. Recent data from event-related evoked potentials and neurophysiology also suggest that rapid processing of emotional information may not only occur in parallel to, but promote a more detailed perceptual analysis of, sensory inputs and thus bias competition for attention toward the representation of emotionally salient stimuli.

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Crossref · 10.1097/00001504-200205000-00011

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  • Humans are hard-wired to attend specifically to those features of the social environment that are likely to help predict the future actions of others, and reactions to such social cues engage different brain regions from non-social spatial cues.

    “This suggests that humans are hard-wired to attend specifically to those features of the social environment that are likely to help predict the future actions of others (e.g. faces showing an emotional expression attract more attention [81]), and there is some evidence that reactions to such social cues engage different brain regions from non-social spatial cues [82].”

    From The social origins of consciousness (2025) · cites this paper as [81]

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Authors
Vuilleumier, P.
Affiliations
National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery (GB)
Corresponding author
Vuilleumier, Patrik
ORCID
Vuilleumier, Patrik
Venue
Current Opinion in Psychiatry
Publisher
Ovid Technologies (Wolters Kluwer Health)
Published
2002-05
Volume
15
Issue
3
Pages
291-300
ISSN
0951-7367 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1097/00001504-200205000-00011
OpenAlex
W2086530114
Cited by
211
References
84
Citations by year
2026: 2 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 6 · 2022: 4 · 2021: 12 · 2020: 14 · 2019: 8 · 2018: 8 · 2017: 8 · 2016: 6 · 2015: 7 · 2014: 10 · 2013: 8 · 2012: 12
FWCI
2.52
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
  • Current Opinion in Psychiatry (publishedVersion)
  • UCL Discovery (University College London) (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Face Recognition and Perception
  • Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior
Keywords
facial expressions, emotional facial expressions, selective attention, anger, fear, preattentive processing, amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, superior temporal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, fusiform cortex, perceptual salience, attentional bias, event-related potentials

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