Attentional Bias Toward Emotional Facial Expressions Among Survivors of Domestic Violence

Abstract

Domestic Violence has been recognised as a cognitive burden

however, the objective behavioral evidence of the attentional consequences remains absent in the Indian empirical literature. The current study examined attentional capture in DV survivors by utilising angry, fearful and happy facial expressions in a modified Emotional Additional Singleton Task (E-AST). A quantitative, quasi-experimental methodology with a 2 × 4 Mixed Factorial design was employed with 15 DV survivors recruited from Sakhi One Stop Centre, Ahmedabad, and 15 University controls. Participants performed a goal-directed visual search task wherein task-irrelevant emotional distractors were presented within the neutral face arrays. Brief Symptom Inventory was used to assess current psychological distress along with NFHS-5 Domestic Violence Module to screen for DV exposure. DV survivors produced significantly longer reaction times than controls, with the largest group difference observed for angry facial distractors and a large between-subjects effect. Survivors demonstrated significantly higher attentional interference for angry faces than controls. Interference scores followed the predicted ordering of Angry greater than Fear greater than Happy, directionally supporting the Anger Superiority Effect. Contrarily, psychological distress severity did not positively correlate with attentional capture within survivors, suggesting a ceiling effect wherein chronic hypervigilance occurs as a constant background state rather than discrete stimulus-driven capture. Such findings provide objective behavioral evidence that DV survivors in India demonstrate a threat-calibrated attentional processing, while indicating a need for clinical intervention for such a population.