Discriminating Happy or Sad Faces in a Visual Search Paradigm Reveals Possible Pre-Attentive Effects for Individuals with Negative Affect

Using a visual search paradigm, we investigated the role exogenous versus endogenous attention plays in differentiating happy and sad faces for individuals experiencing high (H-) medium (M-) and low (L-) general negative affect. Instead of an attentional bias, our response times suggest a pre-attentive set size effect for H-participants.