Neuroticism related attentional biases on an emotion recognition task

Objective: It has been suggested that neurotic individuals rapidly detect emotional stimuli as their cognitive system is may be in an alert mode that prioritizes the encoding of negative or threatening cues. However, it is still unknown whether this assumption could be generalized to all emotional faces or it is specific to certain types of emotional faces. Methods: To examine for this aim, 95 participants filled a set of questionnaires including 21 item Eysenck Personality Questionnaire. Subsequently, they performed an emotion recognition task that consisted of a series of emotional faces. Results: The results showed that neuroticism was associated with faster response times in the presented emotional faces but not happy faces. Also, neuroticism did not associate with accurate recognition of the faces except for sad faces. Discussion: It has been concluded that neuroticism which associated with information processing may cause negative biases because worry related negative affects cause selective attention toward negative stimuli. Thus, neurotic individuals rapidly detect negative stimuli as their cognitive system is on alert mode and therefore prioritizes encoding of negative or threatening cues.