Aging and visual search: Automatic and controlled attentional bias to threat faces

Using a visual search paradigm, we investigated how age affected attentional bias to emotional facial expressions. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants searched for a discrepant facial expression in a matrix of otherwise homogeneous faces. Both younger and older adults showed a more effective search when the discrepant face was angry rather than happy or neutral. However, when the angry faces served as non-target distractors, younger adults’ search was less effective than happy or neutral distractor conditions. In contrast, older adults showed a more efficient search with angry distractors than happy or neutral distractors, indicating that older adults were better able to inhibit angry facial expressions. In Experiment 3, we found that even a top–down search goal could not override the angry face superiority effect in guiding attention. In addition, RT distribution analyses supported that both younger and older adults performed the top–down angry face search qualitatively differently from the top–down happy face search. The current research indicates that threat face processing involves automatic attentional shift and a controlled attentional process. The current results suggest that age only influenced the controlled attentional process.