Emotion drives attention: Detecting the snake in the grass

Participants searched for discrepant fear-relevant pictures (snakes or spid ers) in grid-pattern arrays of fear-irrelevant pictures belonging to the sa me category (flowers or mushrooms) and vice versa. Fear-relevant pictures w ere found more quickly than fear-irrelevant ones. Fear-relevant, but not fe ar-irrelevant, search was unaffected by the location of the target in the d isplay and by the number of distractors, which suggests parallel search for fear-relevant targets and serial search for fear-irrelevant targets. Parti cipants specifically fearful of snakes but not spiders (or vice versa) show ed facilitated search for the feared objects but did not differ from contro ls in search for nonfeared fear-relevant or fear-irrelevant, targets. Thus, evolutionary relevant threatening stimuli were effective in capturing atte ntion, and this effect was further facilitated if the stimulus was emotiona lly provocative.