The phrase "a fearful face" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe someone's facial expression that conveys fear or anxiety.
Example: "As the thunder roared outside, she turned to him with a fearful face, her eyes wide with terror."
Alternatives: "a frightened expression" or "a scared visage".
A fearful face signals to the viewer the presence of a threat, thus inducing fear, although the exact mechanisms remain to be determined.
Second, it may be that a fearful face attracts infants' attention away from the object more than a neutral expression.
This suggests that infants were indeed sensitive to the adult's eye gaze direction, and did not react with enhanced attention toward objects that had previously been presented with a fearful face gazing away from the object.
If the presence of a fearful face prevented efficient encoding of objects in study 1 the same effect should have been observed in study 3, which was not the case.
Therefore, when presented again, objects that had been gaze cued by a fearful face may be more novel and attract more attention compared to objects that had been accompanied by a neutral face.
First, it is conceivable that a fearful face directing eye gaze toward a simultaneously presented object elicits an unspecific arousal which causes infants to direct attention toward any following stimulus.
We found that, relative to a neutral prime face (neutral fear face), a fearful prime face speeded up participants' reaction to a fearful target (fear fear face), when they were not aware of the masked prime face.
Both groups could correctly identify a "happy" or "fearful" face, a function long associated with the amygdala.
Our study reveals that participants were slower to deny the existence of a subliminally presented fearful face than a neutral one (false negative).
Since an increased number of fixation responses (i.e., no movement) with a centrally presented fearful face has been given as evidence of the effect of fearful faces on attentional disengagement [ 5], we computed an index of the attentional bias to threat-related stimuli on the basis of these fixation responses.
This produces an estimate of the attentional bias: a more positive number indicates a greater tendency to direct attention toward the fearful face (a greater negative attentional bias).
