Literature Review Negative and Positive Bias for Emotional Faces: Evidence from the Attention and Working Memory Paradigms Qianru Xu1,2, Chaoxiong Ye1,2*, Simeng Gu1,3, Zhonghua Hu1, Yi Lei1, Xueyan Li4, Lihui Huang5, Qiang Liu1 1Institute of Brain and Psychological Sciences, Sichuan Normal University, Chengdu, China; 2Department of Psychology, University of Jyvaskyla, Jyväskylä, Finland; 3Department of Medical Psychology, Jiangsu University Medical School, Zhenjiang, China; 4School of Foreign Languages, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China; 5Faculty of Education, Sichuan Normal University, Chengdu, China; Running-head: Negative and positive bias for emotional faces Author Note This work was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (no. 31700948 and no. 31970989), and the Academy of Finland (no. 333649). All the authors had full independence from the funding sources. We would like to thank Dr. Weizhen Xie for the helpful discussion. Correspondence should be addressed to Dr. Chaoxiong Ye, Institute of Brain and Psychological Sciences, Sichuan Normal University, Chengdu, 610000, China, Email:
[email protected]. 1 ABSTRACT Visual attention and visual working memory (VWM) are two major cognitive functions in humans, and they have much in common. A growing body of research has investigated the effect of emotional information on visual attention and VWM. Interestingly, contradictory findings have supported both a negative bias and a positive bias toward emotional faces (e.g., angry faces or happy faces) in the attention and VWM fields. We found that the classical paradigms—that is, the visual search paradigm in attention and the change detection paradigm in VWM—are considerably similar. The settings of these paradigms could therefore be responsible for the contradictory results.