Do emotional faces draw our attention?

The Affective Face Flanker Task measures attentional bias during emotional processing. In this task, participants are presented with a central target face while ignoring surrounding flanker faces that may display angry or hostile expressions. This task can be used to explore relationships between attentional bias and constructs such as current stress level, personality traits, or past experiences with threat. Past research suggests that individuals with heightened sensitivity to threat tend to show slower and less accurate responses when the flankers display angry expressions, indicating that their attention is more easily captured by threatening stimuli (Parra et al., 2018; Zhou & Liu, 2013).

Resources:

• Parra, M. A., Sánchez, M. G., Valencia, S., & Trujillo, N. (2018). Attentional bias during emotional processing: evidence from an emotional flanker task using IAPS. Cognition & emotion, 32(2), 275–285. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2017.1298994
• Zhou P, Liu X (2013). Attentional Modulation of Emotional Conflict Processing with Flanker Tasks. PLoS ONE 8(3), e60548. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0060548

Parameters

• Task instructions: Customizable text displayed at the beginning of the task.
• Number of practice repetitions: 1
• Number of main repetitions: 3
  Note: Each repetition consists of 4 trials.
• Inter-trial interval: 2000 ms
• Duration of fixation cross: 500 ms
• Duration of stimulus: 400 ms
• Trial randomization: Yes
  The trial sequence is randomized and balanced across congruent and incongruent conditions.

Disclaimer
Any languages that are currently offered besides English for this survey are not necessarily validated translations. This survey was translated using Google Translate and verified by members of the community.

What data is collected? How is it scored?
The following variables are recorded:

• reaction_time_congruent: Mean reaction time (in ms) for correct responses on congruent trials, where the flanker faces display the same emotional expression as the central face (less attentional capture by distractors). Higher scores indicate slower responses.
• reaction_time_incongruent: Mean reaction time (in ms) for correct responses on incongruent trials, where the flanker faces display a different emotional expression from the central face (more attentional capture by distractors). Higher scores suggest increased attentional capture by conflicting emotional stimuli.
• correct_response_proportion_congruent: Proportion of correct responses in congruent trials, where the flanker faces display the same emotional expression as the central face (less attentional capture by distractors). Higher proportions indicate better accuracy when irrelevant stimuli match the target emotion.
• correct_response_proportion_incongruent: Proportion of correct responses in incongruent trials, where the flanker faces display a different emotional expression from the central face (more attentional capture by distractors). Higher proportions indicate better accuracy when facing conflicting emotional information.

Raw data: The raw data includes trial-level reaction times (in milliseconds) and accuracy (correct/incorrect) for each trial, which are aggregated to compute mean reaction times and accuracy proportions for congruent and incongruent conditions.

Calculation:
Subscores are determined by calculating:

• reaction_time_congruent: Average reaction time of all correct responses on congruent trials (typical range ≈200–2000 ms).
• reaction_time_incongruent: Average reaction time of all correct responses on incongruent trials (typical range ≈200–2000 ms).
• correct_response_proportion_congruent: Number of correct responses in congruent trials ÷ Total number of congruent trials (range 0–1)
• correct_response_proportion_incongruent: Number of correct responses in incongruent trials ÷ Total number of incongruent trials (range 0–1)

Note: Time-out trials are considered incorrect and are excluded from reaction time calculations.