Asymmetry In Emotional Face Search

Human beings are a kind of social animal, and the face is the most biological and social stimulus of human in social activities. Whether there is a bias of attention in different types of emotional faces, as the emotional faces appear frequently in social activities. Some studies have shown that there are many inconsistencies in the causes of the search asymmetry phenomenon, so the purpose of this study is to explore the causes of the asymmetry of the emotional face searching.In this study, three experiments were performed: the schematic faces and the photographic faces were used as stimulus materials separately in both two experiments, and the preview search pattern was used to systematically study the search efficiency for different emotional faces under six search tasks. The six search tasks are as follows: search for the happy faces in the neutral faces, search for angry faces, search for neutral faces in happy faces, search for neutral faces in angry faces,search for angry faces in happy faces, search for happy face in happy faces. The eye movement data in searching process was recorded by eye tracker to further verify whether there are any difficulty in capturing and stimulus detachment.The results show that search advantage effect is not stable in schematic faces. It will change with the changing of the search tasks arrangement. In photographic faces,the search advantage effect is more stable, whether it is in experiment 2 or experiment 3. Even a slight modification in experimental operation was made, it can still be observed. Also, there is significant preview effect whether the stimulus are photographic faces or schematic faces.The main reason for different search advantage effects is that the visual characteristics of the stimulus in the emotional faces.