Attention towards Facial Regions Varies between Emotion Types but not between Attachment Styles

Both a viewer’s internal state and the specific emotion being reflected will affect how well facial emotional expressions are understood. Certain facial regions may be informative about particular emotions. Studies suggest that attachment styles are highly influential on our reactions or attentional processes towards emotional stimuli. We investigated the effect of attachment styles on attention to emotional expressions and the role of facial regions on analyzing the emotional expressions by using a facial change detection task. While attachment style did not substantially affect detection performance for facial regions, viewing sad and angry faces led to the highest lowest detection performances respectively. Emotion type only affected the performances around the eye and the nose regions. While neutral and sad expressions drew attention to the eye region, neutral and angry expressions drew attention to the nose region. We conclude that while emotion types influence face viewing strategies, attachment styles do not. Although attachment styles affect information processes such as attention, recognition or recall of emotional stimuli, evaluating facial emotions may be involved in lower-level information processes. Our results also indicate that facial emotions that evoke emphatic or averting feelings influence people’s dwell time on expressions and how thoroughly they examine faces.