The anger superiority effect revisited: a visual crowding task

Visual search studies have shown that threatening facial expressions are more efficiently detected among a crowd of distractor faces than nonthreatening expressions, known as the anger superiority effect (ASE). However, the opposite finding has also been documented. The present study investigated the ASE in the visual periphery with a visual crowding task. In the study, the target face either appeared alone (uncrowded condition) or was crowded by four neutral or emotional faces (crowded condition). Participants were instructed to determine whether the target face was happy or angry. Experiment 1 showed an ASE when crowded by neutral faces. Intriguingly, this superiority vanished when the target face was crowded by emotional faces that had a different expression from the target as well as when the target face was presented alone. Experiment 2 replicated this result in an independent sample of East Asians (vs. Caucasians in Experiment 1) and thus demonstrated the robustness and cross-cultural consistency of our findings. Together, these results suggest that the ASE in the visual periphery is contingent on task demands induced by visual crowding.