ANGRY FACES AND THE ATTENTIONAL BLINK 1343 for details). The latter criterion was adopted because if participants could not detect a single target reliably in a RSVP stream, their results from critical trials with two targets would be difficult to interpret. Two participants were excluded due to below-criterion performance on the screening task and a third participant was excluded because of poor accuracy on single-target control trials (below two SDs of the sample mean). Thus, data from 20 individuals (13 females; mean age 25.6 year, SD 3.5 years) were analysed. Participants who completed the experiment received £9 payment. Stimuli Four schematic faces were used as target stimuli: a threat face, a positive face and two neutral faces (see Figure 1). The two emotional faces and one of the neutral faces were the same as those used by O¨ hman et al. (2001): the threat face was their ‘‘angry’’ exemplar and the positive face was their ‘‘friendly’’ exemplar. The latter is referred to here as a ‘‘positive’’ face, as it has been described previously as both a ‘‘friendly’’ face and a ‘‘happy’’ face (Calvo & Esteves, 2005; Juth et al., 2005). All four face stimuli differed with respect to three main features; eyebrow, eye and mouth shape (e.g., when comparing the threat and positive faces, the mouth and eyes were inverted and the eyebrows switched). Two non-identical neutral faces were used to minimise potential effects of repetition blindness (i.e., reduced ability to detect the second of two identical items in a RSVP stream; Kanwisher, 1987). There were also 30 different distractor stimuli, which comprised the key features of each face stimulus in random positions and orientations (see Figure 2 for examples of distractor stimuli). All stimuli subtended a visual angle of 5.78 7.58 and were displayed on a black background at a viewing distance of 50 cm. Stimulus presentation was controlled by Millisecond software (www.millisecond.com). Each stimulus was presented for 128.5 ms using a 70 Hz refresh rate (i.e., each image was displayed for nine screen refreshes at a 70 Hz refresh rate resulting in a display time of 128.5 ms; these durations were determined in pilot work and checked with an oscilloscope). Figure 1. Illustration of schematic face stimuli displaying threat, positive and two neutral facial expressions.