Abstract
Most research on attentional biases towards emotional information has been conducted in the visual modality. There are theoretical debates about whether attentional processes generalize across nonverbal modalities (e.g., facial vs. vocal), but no research has directly compared how emotional faces and voices capture attentional resources. The current study compared response time-based measures of attentional bias to emotional expressions in facial and vocal dot-probe tasks. Participants (18–63 years old; 52% men, 45% women, 3% non-binary) located cues that replaced one of two simultaneously presented stimuli (pairings of angry-neutral, happy-neutral, or angry-happy faces/voices). Participants showed greater difficulty disengaging from non-targets (i.e., neutral stimuli, or happy stimuli when paired with angry) in the vocal than the facial modality. Attention shifted from greater avoidance of vocal emotional targets to greater vigilance towards them across trials, but there was no change in attentional biases towards facial stimuli across the task. Differential attentional biases to emotional versus neutral voices may thus be larger in magnitude and more dynamic than with faces. Taken together, these findings provide emerging evidence of distinct patterns of attentional allocation between nonverbal modalities in the dot-probe. Future work should examine whether stimulus or task features contribute to modality-specific attentional biases to emotion.
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Data, code, and study materials are available on OSF: https://osf.io/rnxvz/?view_only=2b08001c4d614d3484f68469157dafd3.
Notes
The majority of participants (n = 81) were between 18 and 25 years of age; results remain unchanged when participants ages 35 to 63 were removed from analyses (see Supplemental Materials).
Results remain unchanged when these participants were excluded from analyses (see Supplemental Materials).
Results held when covarying for participants’ accuracy in either task. However, accuracy among retained participants was predictive of difficulty disengaging with targets, avoidance, and vigilance (see Supplemental Materials), suggesting task difficulty may partially contribute to patterns of attentional allocation in the dot-probe task.
Targets are not labelled as such in task instructions to participants. Rather, they are selected as the reference point for the computation of attentional bias measures, which capture relative differences in response times to different trial types. Selecting a different target would change the interpretation of a positive versus negative value for each index score, but would not change the overall pattern of results (i.e., would not affect the relative difference in response time between types of trials).
We opted to designate ‘angry’ stimuli as the targets in AHHA trials, given that the majority of extant literature using the dot-probe task characterizes attentional biases to anger (over neutral) stimuli. However, we also performed all analyses without the AHHA trials, which are structurally dissimilar to the ANNA and HNNH trials (that pit putatively emotional stimuli against neutral stimuli). All results remained unchanged when these trials were excluded from analyses (see Supplemental Materials), suggesting robustness of our findings to various stimulus combinations.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to extend our gratitude to Dr. Travis Evans for sharing expertise and scripts for response-based computational indices of attentional bias. We are also thankful to Reem Atallah, Jay Burns, Kate Cullen, Logan Goldring, Bingyi Lin, Sierra McNulty, Maya Morcos, Daniel Nault, Sarah Robichaud, and Emily Schreiner for their help with data collection. We are grateful to Justin Siu and Ryan Coughlar for their technical assistance. Thank you also to the participants for their time and engagement in this project.
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This work was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (GPIN-2021-03130).
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M.M., R.J.T.B., and E.I. contributed to experimental design; O.M., R.J.T.B., and E.I. contributed to data collection and data processing. O.M. and M.M. computed analyses. M.M. wrote the manuscript, with supporting contributions and edits from O.M., R.J.T.B., and E.I.
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Emotional voices elicit different patterns of attentional biases than emotional faces. These results suggest that research on attention to emotion in faces may not generalize to other forms of nonverbal cues.
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Morningstar, M., Merulla, O., Bonar, R.J.T. et al. Modality-specific attentional biases to facial vs. vocal emotions. Psychological Research 90, 145 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-026-02356-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-026-02356-9