Emotion-specific modulation of early visual perception.

Exposure to fearful facial expressions enhances vision at low spatial-frequencies and impairs vision at high spatial-frequencies. This perceptual trade-off is thought to be a consequence of a fear-related activation of the magnocellular visual pathway to the amygdala. In this study we examined the generality of the effect of emotion on low-level visual perception by assessing participants' orientation sensitivity to low and high spatial-frequency targets following exposure to disgust, fear, and neutral facial expressions.