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Last updated: 26 May 2011
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Do emotional hand gestures and faces capture our attention? I was examining this question as a doctoral candidate under the guidance of my principal supervisor A/Prof Kate Stevens and associate supervisor Prof Andreas Ioannides.
The need to respond to important stimuli in the environment has equipped our brains to instantly attend to emotional stimuli. Indeed, many studies have demonstrated automatic capture of attention using, for example, emotional facial expressions.
Emotional stimuli, however, are not limited to facial expressions. My work, therefore, investigated whether emotional hand gestures can also automatically capture our attention.
Participants were asked to judge the gender of briefly presented neutral, positive and negative static or dynamic hand gestures and faces (see the task). They were not told that the emotional meaning of stimuli was being manipulated.
If emotional stimuli can capture attention, then participants will make more errors judging the gender of positive or negative stimuli because emotional stimuli will automatically capture attention and limit participants’ ability to identify gender of emotional stimuli. Indeed, participants made more errors when identifying the gender of emotional hand gestures compared to neutral hand gestures.
This finding provided evidence that emotional hand gestures, similar to facial expressions, can automatically capture our attention.
A brief summary and the abstract of the thesis is on this page.