Research articleElectrophysiological evidence for attentional capture by irrelevant angry facial expressions: Naturalistic faces

•Participants were asked to judge the gender of a neutral target face.•Angry or happy distractor faces increased reaction times.•The PD component suggests that angry distractors were attentionally suppressed.•Angry distractors elicited a larger N450 component, reflecting conflict detection.•The results support the idea that angry faces are attentionally prioritized.

Recently, research on lateralized event related potentials (ERPs) in response to irrelevant distractors has revealed that angry but not happy schematic distractors capture spatial attention. Whether this effect occurs in the context of the natural expression of emotions is unknown. To fill this gap, observers were asked to judge the gender of a natural face surrounded by a color singleton among five other face identities. In contrast to previous studies, the similarity between the task-relevant feature (color) and the distractor features was low. On some trials, the target was displayed concurrently with an irrelevant angry or happy face. The lateralized ERPs to these distractors were measured as a marker of spatial attention. Our results revealed that angry face distractors, but not happy face distractors, triggered a PD, which is a marker of distractor suppression. Subsequent to the PD, angry distractors elicited a larger N450 component, which is associated with conflict detection. We conclude that threatening expressions have a high attentional priority because of their emotional value, resulting in early suppression and late conflict detection.