Open AccessWorking memory guidance of visual attention to threat in offenders
Author(s) -
Tamara Satmarean,
Elizabeth Milne,
Richard Rowe
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
plos one
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.99
H-Index - 332
ISSN - 1932-6203
DOI - 10.1371/journal.pone.0261882
Subject(s) - anger , working memory , psychology , aggression , cognitive psychology , attribution bias , visual search , cognition , valence (chemistry) , trait , poison control , attentional bias , social cognition , attribution , developmental psychology , social psychology , computer science , neuroscience , medicine , physics , environmental health , quantum mechanics , programming language
Aggression and trait anger have been linked to attentional biases toward angry faces and attribution of hostile intent in ambiguous social situations. Memory and emotion play a crucial role in social-cognitive models of aggression but their mechanisms of influence are not fully understood. Combining a memory task and a visual search task, this study investigated the guidance of attention allocation toward naturalistic face targets during visual search by visual working memory (WM) templates in 113 participants who self-reported having served a custodial sentence. Searches were faster when angry faces were held in working memory regardless of the emotional valence of the visual search target. Higher aggression and trait anger predicted increased working memory modulated attentional bias. These results are consistent with the Social-Information Processing model, demonstrating that internal representations bias attention allocation to threat and that the bias is linked to aggression and trait anger.