Happy Is Stronger Than Sad: Emotional Information Modulates Social Attention

Social directional cues (e.g., gaze direction; walking direction) can trigger reflexive attentional orienting, a phenomenon known as social attention. Here, we examined whether this reflexive social attention could be modulated by the emotional content embedded in social cues. By introducing emotional (happy and sad) biological motion (BM) stimuli to the modified central cuing paradigm, we found that the happy but not the sad emotional gait could significantly boost attentional orienting effect relative to the neutral gait. Critically, this "happiness advantage" effect could be extended to social attention induced by gaze. Furthermore, the observed differential emotional modulations could not be simply explained by low-level physical differences between the emotional stimuli, as inverted social cues (i.e., BM and face) failed to produce such modulation effects. Overall, these findings highlight the role of emotional information in modulating the processing of social signals, and further suggest the existence of a general emotional modulation on social attention triggered by different types of social signals.