Social anxiety biases the evaluation of facial displays: evidence from single face and multi-facial stimuli

Anxious youth and adults share threat-biased interpretations of linguistic and visual ambiguity: A proof of concept study

Interpretation bias, or the threatening appraisal of ambiguous information, has been linked to anxiety disorder. Interpretation bias has been demonstrated for linguistic (e.g., evaluation of ambiguous sentences) and visual judgments (e.g., categorizing emotionally ambiguous facial expressions). It is unclear how these separate components of bias might be associated. We examined linguistic and visual interpretation biases in youth and emerging adults with (n = 44) and without (n = 40) anxiety disorder, and in youth-parent dyads (n = 40). Linguistic and visual biases were correlated with each other, and with anxiety. Compared to non-anxious participants, those with anxiety demonstrated stronger biases, and linguistic bias was especially predictive of anxiety symptoms and diagnosis. Age did not moderate these relationships. Parent linguistic bias was correlated with youth anxiety but not linguistic bias; parent and youth visual biases were correlated. Linguistic and visual interpretation biases are linked in clinically-anxious youth and emerging adults.

Relationship between types of anxiety and the ability to recognize facial expressions

This study examined whether three subtypes of anxiety (trait anxiety, state anxiety, and social anxiety) have different effects on recognition of facial expressions. One hundred and thirty-eight participants matched facial expressions of three intensity levels (20 %, 40 %, 100 %) with one of the six emotion labels ("happy", "sad", "fear", "angry", "disgust", and "surprise"). While using a conventional method of analysis we were able to replicate some significant correlations between each anxiety type and recognition performance found in the literature. However, when we used partial correlation to isolate the effect of each anxiety type, most of these correlations were no longer significant, apart from the negative correlations between Beck Anxiety Inventory and reaction time to fearful faces displayed at 40 % intensity level, and the correlations between anxiety and categorisation errors. Specifically, social anxiety was positively correlated with misidentifying a happy face as a disgust face at 40 % intensity level, and state anxiety negatively correlated with misidentifying a happy face as a sad face at 20 % intensity level. However, these partial correlation analyses became non-significant after p value adjustment for multiple comparisons. Our eye tracking data also showed that state anxiety may be associated with reduced fixations on the eye regions of low-intensity sad or fearful faces. These analyses cast doubts on some effects reported in the previous studies because they are likely to reflect a mixture of influences from highly correlated anxiety subtypes.

Socially Anxious Tendencies Affect Impressions of Others' Positive and Negative Emotional Gazes

Socially anxious tendencies have potential to become social anxiety disorder (SAD), which is characterized by fear of social situations associated with being evaluated or embarrassed by others. In particular, others’ gazes induce social anxiety. People with SAD have a negative interpretation bias toward ambiguous emotions in others’ faces; however, negative interpretation bias toward ambiguous emotions in others’ gazes has not been fully investigated. We used an impression judgment task to examine negative interpretation bias toward others’ gazes among people with socially anxious tendencies. We generated emotionally ambiguous gazes (positive, negative, and neutral) using a morphing technique with 10% steps (neutral, 10–100% negative, and 10–100% positive). Participants (all male) were asked to judge whether the stimulus was positive or negative. Each participant’s level of social anxiety was examined using the Japanese version of the Social Phobia Inventory (SPIN-J), which measures three symptom dimensions: fear, avoidance, and physiological arousal. To examine the influence of socially anxious tendencies in the impression judgment task, we calculated the point of subjective equality (PSE) using a two-step logistic curve fitted to individual participant’s responses. The negative emotional intensity of the PSE became lower as the fear score became higher (p < 0.05). This result suggests individuals with a high tendency toward social anxiety tend to interpret subtle negative emotional gazes as a negative emotion and regard these gazes as a threat.

Cross-cultural and hemispheric laterality effects on the ensemble coding of emotion in facial crowds

In many social situations, we make a snap judgment about crowds of people relying on their overall mood (termed "crowd emotion"). Although reading crowd emotion is critical for interpersonal dynamics, the sociocultural aspects of this process have not been explored. The current study examined how culture modulates the processing of crowd emotion in Korean and American observers. Korean and American (non-East Asian) participants were briefly presented with two groups of faces that were individually varying in emotional expressions and asked to choose which group between the two they would rather avoid. We found that Korean participants were more accurate than American participants overall, in line with the framework on cultural viewpoints: Holistic versus analytic processing in East Asians versus Westerners. Moreover, we found a speed advantage for other-race crowds in both cultural groups. Finally, we found different hemispheric lateralization patterns: American participants were more accurate to perceive the facial crowd to be avoided when it was presented in the left visual field than the right visual field, indicating a right hemisphere advantage for processing crowd emotion of both European American and Korean facial crowds. However, Korean participants showed weak or nonexistent laterality effects, with a slight right hemisphere advantage for European American facial crowds and no advantage in perceiving Korean facial crowds. Instead, Korean participants showed positive emotion bias for own-race faces. This work suggests that culture plays a role in modulating our crowd emotion perception of groups of faces and responses to them.

Social anxiety and perception of (un)trustworthiness in smiling faces

In social environments the smile can be driven by different motives and convey different emotions. This makes a smiling face ambiguous and amenable to alternative interpretations. We investigated how social anxiety is related to trustworthiness evaluation of morphed dynamic smiling faces depending on changes in the eye expression. Socially anxious and non-anxious participants judged the un/trustworthiness of people with different smiles. Social anxiety was related to reduced trustworthiness of (a) faces with a neutral mouth unfolding to a smile when the eyes were neutral at the beginning or end of the dynamic sequence, and (b) faces with a smiling mouth when happy eyes slightly changed towards neutrality, surprise, fear, sadness, disgust, or anger. In contrast, social anxiety was not related to trustworthiness judgments for non-ambiguous expressions unfolding from neutral (eyes and mouth) to happy (eyes and mouth) or from happy to neutral. Socially anxious individuals are characterized by an interpretation bias towards mistrusting any ambiguous smile due to the presence of non-happy eyes.

Social anxiety and trustworthiness judgments of dynamic facial expressions of emotion

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

Perception of trustworthiness in other people is essential for successful social interaction. Facial expressions-as conveyers of feelings and intentions-are an important source of this information. We investigated how social anxiety is related to biases in the judgment of faces towards un/trustworthiness depending on type of emotional expression and expressive intensity.

METHODS

Undergraduates with clinical levels of social anxiety and low-anxiety controls were presented with 1-s video-clips displaying facial happiness, anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, or neutrality, at various levels of emotional intensity. Participants judged how trustworthy the expressers looked like.

RESULTS

Social anxiety was associated with enhanced distrust towards angry and disgusted expressions, and this occurred at lower intensity thresholds, relative to non-anxious controls. There was no effect for other negative expressions (sadness and fear), basically ambiguous expressions (surprise and neutral), or happy faces.

LIMITATIONS

The social anxiety and the control groups consisted of more females than males, although this gender disproportion was the same in both groups. Also, the expressive speed rate was different for the various intensity conditions, although such differences were equated for all the expressions and for both groups.

CONCLUSIONS

Individuals with high social anxiety overestimate perceived social danger even from subtle facial cues, thus exhibiting a threat-related interpretative bias in the form of untrustworthiness judgments. Such a bias is, nevertheless, limited to facial expressions conveying direct threat such as hostility and rejection.

Social Anxiety and Interpretation Bias

This study examined how positive-scale assessment of ambiguous social stimuli affects interpretation bias in social anxiety. Participants with high and low social anxiety ( N = 60) performed a facial expression discrimination task to assess interpretation bias. Participants were then randomly assigned to assess the emotion of briefly presented faces either on a negative or on a positive scale. They subsequently repeated the facial expression discrimination task. Participants with high versus low social anxiety made more negative interpretations of ambiguous facial expressions. However, those in the positive-scale assessment condition subsequently showed reduced negative interpretations of ambiguous facial expressions. These results suggest that interpretation bias in social anxiety could be mediated by positive priming rather than an outright negative bias.

The neural substrates of response inhibition to negative information across explicit and implicit tasks in GAD patients: electrophysiological evidence from an ERP study

Background: It has been established that the inability to inhibit a response to negative stimuli is the genesis of anxiety. However, the neural substrates of response inhibition to sad faces across explicit and implicit tasks in general anxiety disorder (GAD) patients remain unclear.

Methods: Electrophysiological data were recorded when subjects performed two modified emotional go/no-go tasks in which neutral and sad faces were presented: one task was explicit (emotion categorization), and the other task was implicit (gender categorization).

Results: In the explicit task, electrophysiological evidence showed decreased amplitudes of no-go/go difference waves at the N2 interval in the GAD group compared to the control group. However, in the implicit task, the amplitudes of no-go/go difference waves at the N2 interval showed a reversed trend. Source localization analysis on no-go/N2 components revealed a decreased current source density (CSD) in the right dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex in GAD individuals relative to controls. In the implicit task, the left superior temporal gyrus and the left inferior parietal lobe showed enhanced activation in GAD individuals and may compensate for the dysfunction of the right dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex.

Conclusion: These findings indicated that the processing of response inhibition to socially sad faces in GAD individuals was interrupted in the explicit task. However, this processing was preserved in the implicit task. The neural substrates of response inhibition to sad faces were dissociated between implicit and explicit tasks.

Towards a cross-modal perspective of emotional perception in social anxiety: review and future directions

The excessive fear of being negatively evaluated constitutes a central component of social anxiety (SA). Models posit that selective attention to threat and biased interpretations of ambiguous stimuli contribute to the maintenance of this psychopathology. There is strong support for the existence of processing biases but most of the available evidence comes from face research. Emotions are, however, not only conveyed through facial cues, but also through other channels, such as vocal and postural cues. These non-facial cues have yet received much less attention. We therefore plead for a cross-modal investigation of biases in SA. We argue that the inclusion of new modalities may be an efficient research tool to (1) address the specificity or generalizability of these biases; (2) offer an insight into the potential influence of SA on cross-modal processes; (3) operationalize emotional ambiguity by manipulating cross-modal emotional congruency; (4) inform the debate about the role of top-down and bottom-up factors in biasing attention; and (5) probe the cross-modal generalizability of cognitive training. Theoretical and clinical implications as well as potential fruitful avenues for research are discussed.

More than a face: a unified theoretical perspective on nonverbal social cue processing in social anxiety

Processing of nonverbal social cues (NVSCs) is essential to interpersonal functioning and is particularly relevant to models of social anxiety. This article provides a review of the literature on NVSC processing from the perspective of social rank and affiliation biobehavioral systems (ABSs), based on functional analysis of human sociality. We examine the potential of this framework for integrating cognitive, interpersonal, and evolutionary accounts of social anxiety. We argue that NVSCs are uniquely suited to rapid and effective conveyance of emotional, motivational, and trait information and that various channels are differentially effective in transmitting such information. First, we review studies on perception of NVSCs through face, voice, and body. We begin with studies that utilized information processing or imaging paradigms to assess NVSC perception. This research demonstrated that social anxiety is associated with biased attention to, and interpretation of, emotional facial expressions (EFEs) and emotional prosody. Findings regarding body and posture remain scarce. Next, we review studies on NVSC expression, which pinpointed links between social anxiety and disturbances in eye gaze, facial expressivity, and vocal properties of spontaneous and planned speech. Again, links between social anxiety and posture were understudied. Although cognitive, interpersonal, and evolutionary theories have described different pathways to social anxiety, all three models focus on interrelations among cognition, subjective experience, and social behavior. NVSC processing and production comprise the juncture where these theories intersect. In light of the conceptualizations emerging from the review, we highlight several directions for future research including focus on NVSCs as indexing reactions to changes in belongingness and social rank, the moderating role of gender, and the therapeutic opportunities offered by embodied cognition to treat social anxiety.

To be or Not to be Threatening, but What was the Question? Biased Face Evaluation in Social Anxiety and Depression Depends on How You Frame the Query

Scientific evidence is equivocal on whether Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is characterized by a biased negative evaluation of facial expressions, even though it is assumed that such a bias plays a crucial role in the maintenance of the disorder. The way of framing the evaluation question may play an important role in the inconsistencies of earlier results. To investigate this issue, an unselected sample of 95 participants (11 males) with varying degrees of social anxiety and depressive symptoms rated facial crowds with different ratios of neutral-disgust, neutral-sad, neutral-happy, and neutral-surprised expressions in terms of friendliness, approval, difficulty to make contact, and threat. It appeared that the impact of social anxiety on ratings was highly dependent on the type of question that was asked, but not on the type of emotion that was shown: a high degree of social anxiety was related to a more positive evaluation of crowds when friendliness was assessed. When asking about the difficulty to make contact, social anxiety was related to more difficulty. When the threat evoked by a crowd had to be evaluated, higher degrees of social anxiety were tendentiously correlated with higher threat ratings. Degree of depression, on the other hand, was negatively correlated only to approval ratings. In addition, with an increasing degree of depression, the negative impact that any additional emotional face had on approval ratings increased as well. The theoretical and methodological implications of the results are discussed.