Rapid orienting to positive, as well as negative, emotional stimuli.

Most of the work on how emotions focus our attention has focused on negative stimuli (snakes, angry faces, etc.) Brosch et al. use ERP measurement to note that our attention also can very reliably be captured by positive nurturance stimuli such as baby faces. The results confirm that biological relevance, and not exclusively fear, produces an automatic spatial orienting toward the location of a stimulus. From the paper:

...we recorded event-related potentials from 20 subjects performing a dot-probe task in which the cues were fear-inducing and nurturance-inducing stimuli (i.e., anger faces and baby faces). Highly similar validity modulation was found for the P1 time-locked to target onset, indicating early attentional capture by both positive and negative emotional stimuli. Topographic segmentation analysis and source localization indicate that the same amplification process is involved whether attention orienting is triggered by negative, fear-relevant stimuli or positive, nurturance-relevant stimuli.

Illustration of the experimental sequence. Each trial started with a fixation cross. Then the cue, consisting of two images presented on the left and right sides of the screen, was presented briefly. One of the two pictures was an emotional face, and the other was a neutral face. Following offset of the face pair, the fixation cross was presented randomly for 100, 150, 200, 250, or 300 ms. Afterward, the target, a triangle pointing upward or downward, appeared for 150 ms in the location of one of the previously presented faces. In a valid trial, the triangle was in the location of the emotional image; in an invalid trial, the triangle was in the location of the neutral image. Some participants were required to respond if the triangle pointed upward, and the others were required to respond if the stimulus pointed downward. SOA = stimulus onset asynchrony.