ArticleBrain sciences2020
Threatening Facial Expressions Impact Goal-Directed Actions Only if Task-Relevant.
Article in Brain sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 35 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
35 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Inhibitory control deficits in borderline personality disorder: a meta-analysis of stop-signal and Go/No-Go tasks.Psychological medicine · 2025Pooled it
- Recognition patterns of dynamic emotional facial expression stimuli.Perception · 2026Article
- How Emotions Influence Cognitive Control: A Within-Subject Investigation.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Differences in gait kinematics and spatiotemporal parameters among different Big Five personality types under emotional states: a three-dimensional motion capture study.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Context matters: task relevance shapes neural responses to emotional facial expressions.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Task-irrelevant emotional expressions are not mimicked, but may modulate the mimicry of task-relevant emotional expressions.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Investigating the impact of surgical masks on behavioral reactions to facial emotions in the COVID-19 era.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Walking to a number: is there affective involvement in generating the SNARC effect in numerical cognition?Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Stepping into emotions: investigating the effect of angry and fearful faces on forward stepping and quiet stance.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2024Article
- Unveiling the influence of task-relevance of emotional faces on behavioral reactions in a multi-face context using a novel Flanker-Go/No-go task.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Semantic satiation of emotional words impedes facial expression processing in two stages.Heliyon · 2023Article
- Role of Cue Training, Context, and Stimulus Intensity on Fear Generalization in Humans.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Reward History Modulates the Processing of Task-Irrelevant Emotional Faces in a Demanding Task.Brain sciences · 2023Article
- Implicit IAT Measures and Neurophysiological fNIRS Markers in Response to High-Engagement Advertising.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- "I cannot see your fear!" Altered recognition of fearful facial expressions in anorexia nervosa.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Intermuscular coherence reveals that affective emotional pictures modulate neural control mechanisms during the initiation of arm pointing movements.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2023Article
- The effect of negative emotion processing on spatial navigation: an experimental study using virtual reality.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Positive and negative facial valence perception are modulated differently by eccentricity in the parafovea.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- The Recognition of Facial Expressions Under Surgical Masks: The Primacy of Anger.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2022Article
- The Influence of Vicarious Fear-Learning in "Infecting" Reactive Action Inhibition.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Facial emotional expressions are a salient source of information for nonverbal social interactions. However, their impact on action planning and execution is highly controversial. In this vein, the effect of the two threatening facial expressions, i.e., angry and fearful faces, is still unclear. Frequently, fear and anger are used interchangeably as negative emotions. However, they convey different social signals. Unlike fear, anger indicates a direct threat toward the observer. To provide new evidence on this issue, we exploited a novel design based on two versions of a Go/No-go task. In the emotional version, healthy participants had to perform the same movement for pictures of fearful, angry, or happy faces and withhold it when neutral expressions were presented. The same pictures were shown in the control version, but participants had to move or suppress the movement, according to the actor's gender. This experimental design allows us to test task relevance's impact on emotional stimuli without conflating movement planning with target detection and task switching. We found that the emotional content of faces interferes with actions only when task-relevant, i.e., the effect of emotions is context-dependent. We also showed that angry faces qualitatively had the same effect as fearful faces, i.e., both negative emotions decreased response readiness with respect to happy expressions. However, anger has a much greater impact than fear, as it increases both the rates of mistakes and the time of movement execution. We interpreted these results, suggesting that participants have to exploit more cognitive resources to appraise threatening than positive facial expressions, and angry than fearful faces before acting.
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