1342 MARATOS, MOGG, BRADLEY angry faces (O¨ hman, 1996). Thus, there are strong theoretical grounds for using face, rather than word, stimuli in order to investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying selective processing of threat. The face is a socially and biologically significant stimulus as well as an important index of emotional information. Moreover, evidence from other paradigms, such as visual search, or visual cueing tasks using briefly presented masked face stimuli, indicates that angry faces are processed preferentially over neutral faces (e.g., Calvo, Avero, & Lundqvist, 2006; Mogg & Bradley, 1999; O¨ hman et al., 2001), although controversy exists over specific methodological issues relating to such paradigms (Pessoa, 2005). Two recent studies examined the effect of fearful faces on the AB, as fearful expressions are threat-relevant, given that they signal threat in the environment, although they are not threatening per se. Fox, Russo, and Georgiou (2005) found that high anxious individuals showed a reduced AB for fearful faces, relative to happy faces, whereas Milders, Sahraie, Logan, and Donnellon (2006) found that the AB was reduced by fearful faces, relative to both happy and neutral faces, in unselected adult participants. Both studies used photographic face stimuli. However, some researchers have advocated the use of schematic face stimuli in preference to ‘‘real’’ faces, because schematic faces are less prone to potential confounds associated with difficulty in controlling low-level perceptual features and familiarity (Fox et al., 2000; Juth, Lundqvist, Karlsson, & O¨ hman, 2005; O¨ hman et al., 2001). Consequently, in this study we extended previous research by using a schematic face version of the RSVP paradigm, which included emotional faces as target stimuli, to assess the depth and temporal resolution of the AB to threatening, positive and neutral stimuli. If threatening stimuli are processed preferentially, then an angry face should result in a reduction of the AB phenomenon when the face appears as the second target. Specifically, our main hypothesis was as follows: if threatening faces have a privileged processing status, then participants’ accuracy in target-identification will be enhanced if the second target in the RSVP stream is a threatening face, rather than a neutral or positive face. This effect should be evident when there is a short interval between the two targets (approx. 200 400 ms), which corre- sponds to the time window of the AB. METHOD Participants These were 23 students (14 female; mean age 25.6 years, SD 3.7 years) from the University of Southampton. The selection criteria were (i) normal or corrected-to-normal vision and (ii) acceptable level of accuracy in detecting single target stimuli, in both the screening and main RSVP tasks (see procedure