Emotional processing has a crucial role in attentional and perceptual processes. The present study investigates the effect of emotional priming, using both facial expressions and emotion words, on subsequent visual search performance. Participants were exposed to primes (happy, sad, angry, fear, disgust, surprise, neutral) presented either as faces or words, followed by a visual search task requiring detection of a target among distractors. We observed reaction times as a measure of attentional modulation for visual search task. Results suggest that emotional primes influence search efficiency, where word primes showed stronger facilitative effects compared to face primes.
Further, it was noted that disgust word primes elicited heightened attentional capture, leading to slower disengagement and increased search costs, whereas angry word prime enhanced target detection speed. Emotional faces showed relatively attenuated effects where sad face primes had increased attentional capture and happy face primes with least attentional imposition. This indicates modality differences in the salience of emotional cues. The result shows the link between emotion and attention, supporting theories of affective priming and providing insights into how different types of emotional stimuli modulate visual search.