ABSTRACT

The present study investigated the exogenous engagement of attention to angry faces in adolescents aged 12 to 15. The faster engagement with angry faces has largely been investigated in emotional cueing tasks with adults and empirical data on emotional modulation of engagement in adolescence is scarce. Additionally, it has been argued that in the exogenous spatial cueing task the assessment of the engagement component of orienting might be obstructed. Therefore, the current study employed an endogenous spatial cueing task with emotional, neutral and meaningless faces as targets and looked specifically at reaction time differences in incongruent trials. It was hypothesised that in incongruent trials adolescents would be faster to engage with the angry face appearing as it appears at the un-cued position than with the happy, neutral or meaningless faces presented at the same un-cue position. Repeated measures ANOVA results indicated that exogenous engagement of attention could be investigated in an endogenous cueing task. Also, angry faces engaged attentional resources of adolescents faster than neutral or socially meaningless faces. As such, this study offered preliminary evidence for the emotional modulation of attentional engagement in adolescents.

KEYWORDS: attentional engagement, adolescents, angry faces, spatial cueing task

PAGES: 171-188