The emotional value of a stimulus influences how the stimulus itself is perceived, and can "automatically" give rise to processes whose characteristics are inherently related to the emotional content of the stimuli (e.g., emotion-specific action tendencies). However, to provide optimal contextual flexibility, we propose that emotional information can be utilized in an "automatic" manner for novel, goal-directed processes that are not inherently signaled by the emotional meaning of the stimulus. We investigated this question using the endogenous cueing paradigm: Specifically, we asked how rapidly, efficiently, and to what degree of specificity emotional expressions can be utilized to anticipate the location of targets. We tested the specificity of the utilized emotional information by presenting emotional faces with contrasting affective valence (i.e., joy and anger) or pairs of negative expressions (e.g., anger and fear) as informative central cues. By presenting both masked and visible face cues, we tested whether and to what degree of specificity facial expressions can be utilized to orient attention under conditions of limited cue awareness. Cue validity effects emerged consistently in all experiments, and cuing effects built up fast, already at 300 ms cue-target asynchrony, and-at least partly-on the basis of holistic face representation. These results indicate that emotional faces can be utilized in line with a context-specific goal, with high specificity, rapidly, and even on the basis of limited perceptual input, suggesting that the utilization of emotional information can combine remarkable efficiency and situational flexibility in order to achieve optimal outcomes in various critical situations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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当情绪引导您的注意力与特定于上下文的目标一致时：快速使用可见和遮盖的情绪面孔来进行预期的注意力定向。

刺激的情感价值影响刺激本身的感知方式，并且可以“自动”产生其特征与刺激的情感内容固有相关的过程（例如，特定于情绪的动作倾向）。但是，为了提供最佳的上下文灵活性，我们建议可以将情感信息以“自动”方式用于新颖的，目标导向的过程，而刺激过程的情感含义并不能固有地发出这种信号。我们使用内源性提示范例研究了这个问题：具体来说，我们询问了情感表达如何快速，有效以及达到何种程度的特异性来预测目标的位置。我们通过呈现具有对比的情感价（即欢乐和愤怒）或成对的负面表达（如愤怒和恐惧）作为信息丰富的中心提示的情感面孔，测试了所利用的情感信息的特异性。通过呈现掩盖和可见的面部提示，我们测试了在提示意识有限的情况下，面部表情是否可以用于定向以及定向到何种程度的特异性。提示有效性效果在所有实验中始终如一地出现，并且提示效果快速建立，已经在300毫秒提示目标异步，并且至少部分基于整体人脸表示。这些结果表明，可以根据特定于上下文的目标，高度特异性，快速甚至在有限的感知输入基础上使用情感面孔，这表明情感信息的利用可以将卓越的效率和情境灵活性相结合，以便在各种紧急情况下实现最佳结果。（PsycINFO数据库记录（c）2019 APA，保留所有权利）。