Emotion and Object Detection during Continuous Flash Suppression

Abstract

Emotions play an important role in social interaction and thus it makes sense that emotional faces are detected faster than neutral faces. Previous research shows that angry and happy faces are processed preferentially in the brain. This paper will focus on which emotion will reach awareness first during a continuous flash suppression task. Furthermore, the cause of the differences in emotions is investigated. Specifically, results from previous studies show that these differences can either be explained by valence and arousal or by the single features of a face. The results from our study suggest that valence is an important factor in the time it takes to detect emotional faces. Valence, however, only plays an important role in the detection of emotional faces and not in the detection of simples shapes. This suggests that the single features of a face do not underlie the differences in emotional faces.