Effects Of Implicit Power Motive On Attentional Bias For Facial Expression Of Emotion

In recent years, a growing number of researchers have been seeking to understand the unconscious part of cognitive, emotion and personality. Research from motivation psychology showed that there are two independent motivational systems in human:explicit and implicit motives. Explicit motives are motives that a person consciously attribute to his or her behavior, and should be built in late childhood. The development of explicit motives is strongly shaped and influenced by social demands and normative pressures. Implicit should be built in early, preverbal childhood, represent highly generalized preferences for the specific type of situations or cues. These situations and cues are associated with pleasure or aversive through classical or instrumental conditioning, Because implicit motives have no conscious representation, they must be assessed indirectly through picture story exercise which are based on Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). At present, most implicit motive research has focused on the power motive, the achievement motive, and the affiliation motive.Implicit motive play an important role in the regulation of many basic cognitive processes, especially in the stage of attention. Implicit motive orient, direct, and select attention, such that people automatically attend to stimuli in the social environment that carry incentives linked to their implicit motives. Despite the well-documented validity of motive-relevant stimuli grab and hold people’s attention, little research examined the modulatory effect of implicit motives on attentional orienting to incentive cues. An information processing model of implicit and explicit motives pointed that implicit motives preferentially respond to nonverbal cues. Recent research indicates that facial expressions of emotion are particularly salient nonverbal cues for implicit motives. Thus, take implicit power motive (nPower) as example, the present study examined the modulatory effect of implicit power motive on attentional orienting to facial expressions of emotion.The present study included two experiments. In experiment 1, we adopted dot-probe task and emotional stroop task to examine attentional orienting to facial expressions of emotion. In experiment 2, event-related potentials were recorded while high- and low-nPower individuals performed a face version of an emotion Stroop task comprised of anger and neutral faces. Following are the principal results and conclusions:(1) There was no evidence to suggest differential processing of anger and happy faces by high- and low-power individuals on the dot probe task. Power-motivated participants, however, show an attentional bias for surprise faces.(2) There was significant interaction between power level and emotional face type observed for the Stroop interference derived from the emotional Stroop task. In contrast to the low-power subjects, the high-power subjects showed a processing bias for anger and surprise faces, but not for happy faces.(3) nPower does not modify early perceptual and attentional components (P2 and N2), but a later component is affected. Indeed, power-motivated participants showed enhanced P3/LPPs amplitude compared to low-nPower subjects, in response to anger stimuli. These findings demonstrate that anger faces have greater salience for high-nPower individuals and are subject to a more salient, conscious processing.In sum, These results validate that facial expressions of emotion are salient incentive cues for implicit power motive, and they interact with implicit power motive to shape attentional orienting.