Relationship between types of anxiety and the ability to recognize facial expressions.
Emotional faces
Expression recognition
Social anxiety
State anxiety
Trait anxiety
Journal
Acta psychologica
ISSN: 1873-6297
Titre abrégé: Acta Psychol (Amst)
Pays: Netherlands
ID NLM: 0370366
Informations de publication
Date de publication:
Nov 2023
Nov 2023
Historique:
received:
01
12
2022
revised:
16
11
2023
accepted:
28
11
2023
pubmed:
3
12
2023
medline:
3
12
2023
entrez:
2
12
2023
Statut:
ppublish
Résumé
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.
Identifiants
pubmed: 38041913
pii: S0001-6918(23)00276-7
doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2023.104100
pii:
doi:
Types de publication
Journal Article
Langues
eng
Sous-ensembles de citation
IM
Pagination
104100Informations de copyright
Copyright © 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts
Declaration of competing interest We have no known conflict of interest to disclose. We know of no conflicts of interest associated with this publication, and there has been no significant financial support for this work that could have influenced its outcome.