Facial and prosodic emotion recognition in social anxiety disorder
Journal
Cognitive Neuropsychiatry
Journal Volume
22
Journal Issue
4
Pages
331-345
Date Issued
2017
Author(s)
Abstract
Introduction: Patients with social anxiety disorder (SAD) have a cognitive preference to negatively evaluate emotional information. In particular, the preferential biases in prosodic emotion recognition in SAD have been much less explored. The present study aims to investigate whether SAD patients retain negative evaluation biases across visual and auditory modalities when given sufficient response time to recognise emotions. Methods: Thirty-one SAD patients and 31 age- and gender-matched healthy participants completed a culturally suitable non-verbal emotion recognition task and received clinical assessments for social anxiety and depressive symptoms. A repeated measures analysis of variance was conducted to examine group differences in emotion recognition. Results: Compared to healthy participants, SAD patients were significantly less accurate at recognising facial and prosodic emotions, and spent more time on emotion recognition. The differences were mainly driven by the lower accuracy and longer reaction times for recognising fearful emotions in SAD patients. Within the SAD patients, lower accuracy of sad face recognition was associated with higher severity of depressive and social anxiety symptoms, particularly with avoidance symptoms. Conclusion: These findings may represent a cross-modality pattern of avoidance in the later stage of identifying negative emotions in SAD. This pattern may be linked to clinical symptom severity. ? 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Subjects
avoidance response; Facial emotion recognition; prosodic emotion recognition; social anxiety; threatening bias
SDGs
Other Subjects
adult; agoraphobia; anxiety; anxiety disorder; Article; avoidance behavior; clinical article; clinical assessment; comorbidity; controlled study; depression; depression assessment; DSM-IV; emotion; emotion assessment; facial expression; facial recognition; female; follow up; Hamilton Depression Rating Scale; human; Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale; major depression; male; mini international neuropsychiatric interview; obsessive compulsive disorder; panic; posttraumatic stress disorder; priority journal; psychiatrist; response time; social phobia; Structured Clinical Interview for DSM Disorders; analysis of variance; case control study; emotion; facial expression; middle aged; psychology; reaction time; recognition; social phobia; young adult; Adult; Analysis of Variance; Case-Control Studies; Emotions; Facial Expression; Facial Recognition; Female; Humans; Male; Middle Aged; Phobia, Social; Reaction Time; Recognition (Psychology); Young Adult
Type
journal article