Orienting of attention to threatening facial expressions presented under conditions of restricted awareness

Three studies investigated whether individuals preferentially allocate atte ntion to the spatial location of threatening faces presented outside awaren ess. Pairs of face stimuli were briefly displayed and masked in a modified version of the dot-probe task. Each face pair consisted of an emotional (th reat or happy) and neutral face. The hypothesis that preattentive processin g of threat results in attention being oriented towards its location was su pported in Experiments 1 and 3. In both studies, this effect was most appar ent in the left visual field, suggestive of right hemisphere involvement. H owever, in Experiment 2 where awareness of the faces was less restricted (i .e. marginal threshold conditions), preattentive capture of attention by th reat was not evident. There was evidence from Experiment 3 that the tendenc y to orient attention towards masked threat faces was greater in high than low trait anxious individuals.