Research Report Attentional Inhibition Has Social-Emotional Consequences for Unfamiliar Faces Mark J. Fenske, 1 Jane E. Raymond, 2 Klaus Kessler, 3 Nikki Westoby, 2 and Steven P. Tipper 2 1 Harvard Medical School; 2 University of Wales Bangor, Bangor, Wales, United Kingdom; and 3 Heinrich Heine University D ¨ usseldorf, D ¨ usseldorf, Germany ABSTRACT—Visual attention studies often rely on response time measures to show the impact of attentional facilita- tion and inhibition. Here we extend the investigation of the effects of attention on behavior and show that prior at- tentional states associated with unfamiliar faces can in- fluence subsequent social-emotional judgments about those faces. Participants were shown pairs of face images and were asked to withhold a response if a transparent stop- signal cue appeared over one of the faces. This served to associate the cued face with an inhibitory state. Later, when asked to make social-emotional choices about these face pairs, participants chose uncued faces more often than cued faces as ‘‘more trustworthy’’ and chose cued faces more often than uncued faces as ‘‘less trustworthy.’’ For perceptual choices, there was no effect of how the question was framed (which face is ‘‘on a lighter back- ground’’ vs. ‘‘on a darker background’’). These results suggest that attentional inhibition can be associated with socially relevant stimuli, such as faces, and can have specific, deleterious effects on social-emotional judgments. A number of visual attention studies have demonstrated that the time needed to identify a stimulus (or discriminate its location, color, etc.) can depend on the task relevance of prior events. Some events, such as the presentation of a cue indicating a forthcoming target’s location, speed responding (Posner, 1980). Other events slow responding. For example, when attention is drawn to the location of an uninformative cue (and then with- drawn), responses to subsequent stimuli are slower if they ap- pear at that location than if they appear elsewhere (Posner & Cohen, 1984). Neural mechanisms that speed or otherwise en- hance processing of task-relevant information and those that suppress processing of task-irrelevant information (for review, see Kastner & Ungerleider, 2000) are thought to subserve at- tentional facilitation and inhibition processes, respectively. Although contributing greatly to the empirical basis for the construct of attention, response time (RT) effects are relatively small (often measured in tens of milliseconds). They seem un- likely to be the only, or even the main, behavioral consequence of a system that involves a large parallel network of brain areas (e.g., Posner & Petersen, 1990). Indeed, other work has shown that attention can alter visual sensitivity (Raymond, O’Donnell, & Tipper, 1998), spatial resolution (Yeshurun & Carrasco, 1998), and even memory for visual events (Kessler & Tipper, 2004). Here we expand the search for the effects of attention by exploring whether attention can also modify emotional response; specifically, we report a study in which we investigated whether attentional inhibition activated at one point in time can influ- ence social-emotional appraisal of faces seen later on. There are two reasons why we thought this influence might occur. First, neuroanatomical and neuroimaging evidence sug- gests that the brain systems subserving emotion and attention are connected and can be activated in common (Amaral & Price, 1984; Armony & Dolan, 2002; Bush, Luu, & Posner, 2000; Vuilleumier, Armony, Driver, & Dolan, 2001; Yamasaki, LaBar, & McCarthy, 2002). These links provide biological plausibility for our expectation that attention can influence later emotional behavior. Second, two previous studies have shown that prior attention can modulate subjective emotional appraisal of ab- stract stimuli (Fenske, Raymond, & Kunar, 2004; Raymond, Fenske, & Tavassoli, 2003). In the study by Raymond et al., for Address correspondence to Mark J. Fenske, MGH Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Harvard Medical School, 149 Thirteenth St., Room 2301, Charlestown, MA 02129; e-mail: fenske@nmr.mgh. harvard.edu. PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE Volume 16—Number 10 753 Copyright r 2005 American Psychological Society