Fig. 1.

Example trial of a dot-probe task. Each trial began with a fixation cross appearing on screen for 500 ms. After the fixation cross, two faces from the same individual showing a neutral expression and a disgusted expression appeared on the screen (arranged vertically) for 500 ms. The position of the neutral/disgust expressions was counterbalanced, so that each expression appeared with equal frequency on top or bottom. After the faces disappeared, a probe (letter ‘E’ or letter ‘F’, with equal frequency) would appear randomly in the location previously occupied by a neutral expression or a disgusted expression with equal frequency. Participants were instructed to identify the probe as quickly as possible by pushing the controller joystick left (for ‘E’) or right (for ‘F’). A 500 ms inter-trial interval took place before a new trial began.

*Note. The BP4D-Spontaneous database is proprietary, therefore the actual stimuli used are not permissible to print in publications. The faces shown in this example comes from the Umeå University Database of Facial expressions (Samuelsson et al., 2012). Examples of the VR environment (as seen on a computer monitor) can be found in Supplementary Materials.