The face in the crowd revisited: A threat advantage with schematic stimuli

Schematic threatening, friendly, and neutral faces were used to test the hy pothesis that humans preferentially orient their attention toward threat. U sing a visual search paradigm, participants searched for discrepant faces i n matrices of otherwise identical faces. Across 5 experiments, results cons istently showed faster and more accurate detection of threatening than frie ndly targets. The threat advantage was obvious regardless of whether the co nditions favored parallel or serial search (i.e., involved neutral or emoti onal distractors), and it was valid for inverted faces. Threatening angry f aces were more quickly and accurately detected than were other negative fac es (sad or "scheming"), which suggests that the threat advantage can be att ributed to threat rather than to the negative valence or the uniqueness of the target display.