Do emotional faces attract attention : an investigation of the boundary conditions of selection biases in favor of emotional facial stimuli Our senses register numerous signals every second. Further processing of these signals is limited by the capacity of our cognitive system and thus only partly feasible. Human beings need to select a subset from the high amount of available information in order to behave adaptively. For this attention is considered as the central mechanism of stimulus selection. From evolutionary perspective it seems plausible to ascribe emotional faces a pivotal role for survival and thus propose a selection bias for those stimuli. This assumption was tested in various attentional paradigms. Evidence for preferred processing of emotional stimuli in general and emotional faces in particular has been shown in several studies (Bar Haim Lamy Pergamin Bakermans Kranenburg & Van Ijzendoorn 2007; Mogg & Bradley 1998). However a closer look at the respective experiments shows that the results are rather ambiguous and heterogenous. Many emotion effects could not be replicated were based on special samples or were contingent on very special conditions. Therefore the aim of the present dissertation was to investigate if and under what circumstances emotional faces capture visual attention. For this purpose two experimental paradigms were used. In the dot probe paradigm on the one hand attentional capture of two distractor stimuli which were simultaneously presented before the target display was measured. In the flanker paradigm on the other hand the target stimuli were presented simultaneously with the distractor and thus a direct competition between distractors and top down relevant target was present. Furthermore the sample was intentionally recruited in a mixed student population where heightened anxiety is implausible. This was important because anxious people have been demonstrated to show special attention to emotional stimuli which might indicate that the mechanism of attention to emotion is not representative for a normal population. A preferred selection of emotional faces compared to neutral faces was found only when emotions were relevant to the task and distractor processing was mandatory. These results show that emotional facial stimuli are not capturing attention purely bottom up i.e. fast resource free involuntarily and independently from the current task. It is discussed if and how the concept of relevance might be used to explain the present findings as well as former findings. Furthermore it is outlined how the concept of relevance helps to summarize already identified variables that influence attention allocation to emotional faces. Additionally it is shown that irrelevant stimulus information is used to tune the visual system to process stereotype matching information if and only if the context renders this information relevant. This indicates not only a contextdependent attention allocation to irrelevant stimuli but also an influence of these stimuli on basal visual processing. All in all the present work shows that attention is only shifted to emotional faces if in addition to the stimulus properties their relevance is top down considered high enough. It remains open whether these top down influences manifest before the initial attentional capture or later in the form of a delayed disengagement from task relevant stimuli after an initial task independent attentional capture. The present dissertation discusses this question in the outlook section and offers a new promising and eventually connected account for explanation. In a nutshell the present dissertation shows that emotional faces have no extraordinary potential to capture attention bottom up. Instead a complex interaction of goals experiences and other contextual factors determine which stimuli are selected for further processing in a given situation.