Facial Expression Recognition in Socially Anxious Individuals: The Effect of Congruency between Subliminal Emotional Context and Facial Expressions
Date Issued
2016
Date
2016
Author(s)
Hung, Kuo-Lun
Abstract
Objective: The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the congruency between emotional context (e.g., others’ expressions) and target expressions would automatically influences the recognition of facial expressions of socially anxious individuals during social interactions. Cognitive models assumed that expose to social context would activate negative self-schema in high social anxiety individuals, which might lead to hypervigilance to related social threat stimuli, as well as negative interpretive biases (Clark & Wells, 1995; Rapee & Heimberg, 1997) and consequently contribute to misunderstandings of others’ expressions. Facial expressions often include other contexts in real life, which might play an important role in affecting the recognition of facial expressions. Fazio, Sanbonmatsu, Powell, & Kardes (1986) defined “affective priming effect” as when the targets and primes share same value of evaluations, the individuals’ response times would be shorter than when the targets and primes are incongruent. Inspired by these findings and theories, the present study adopted the priming paradigm, by presenting subliminal expressions (primes) prior to targets, to elucidate the role of contexts in the recognition of facial expressions.Method: The present study recruited 120 participants, with high social anxiety, high generalized anxiety, and controls being 40, respectively. A 3×2×5×2 mixed design was performed with group and situation (speech and relax) being the between-subjects factors, and category of expressions (happy, neutral, angry, disgust, and contempt) and congruency (congruency and incongruency) being the within-subjects factors. The dependent variables were accuracy, response time, error rate, and error tendency. Results and conclusions: Under relax condition, the accuracy for the control group in incongruent trials was significantly higher than congruent ones, but the socially anxious group did not show this effect. Under speech condition, both the control group and the social anxious group made more mistakes in incongruent trials than congruent ones, indicating the effect of affective priming. The reaction time analysis displayed that under speech condition, it took longer to react in incongruent trials than in congruent ones, while relax group showed no difference of reaction time between these two kinds of trials. Moreover, among all the congruent trials, the reaction time of the speech group was significantly shorter than the relax group. Analysis of error tendency showed it was more likely for socially anxious participants to misjudge contempt as happy expression than other groups did. The current research inferred that since the experiment itself required social interaction, the socially anxious participants in the relax group might still get a little anxious, and hence, didn’t have sufficient cognitive resources to integrate incongruent emotional contexts into their judgment process of facial expressions. Based on these research findings, future interventions may include elements such as ”mindfulness” to help socially anxious individuals to mindfully aware the target and related emotional cues, and to experience these feelings nonjudgmentally, such that they can integrate these cues and make precise evaluation of facial expression, which may be the first step to subsequent social interactions.
Subjects
social anxiety
recognition of facial expressions
emotional context congruency
subliminal affective priming
Type
thesis
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
Loading...
Name
ntu-105-R01227211-1.pdf
Size
23.54 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum
(MD5):4c75a81efbe78de5db82b7b858bb3012