The Role of Congruency between Emotion Contextual Cues and Facial Expressions on Recognition of Facial Expressions in Social Anxious Individuals
Date Issued
2011
Date
2011
Author(s)
Chang, Yueh-Wen
Abstract
Purpose and method: The purpose of this study was to investigate the interplay of situation manipulation and the congruency of emotion contextual cues and facial expression on recognition of facial expressions in different social anxiety groups. A 2 × 2 × 5 × 2 mixed design with social anxiety group (high vs. low) and situation manipulation (bogus-speech vs. relax) serving as between participants factors, and facial expression category (angry, contempt, disgust, happy, and neutral face) and congruency (congruent vs. incongruent) serving as within participants factors. The dependent variables were accuracy, error rate, and reaction time. A total of 83 participants were divided into high social anxious group (n = 42) and low social anxious group (n = 41) according to their scores on the Fear of Negative Evaluation Scale. To explore the influence of facial expressions, emotional context, and their interplay on recognition accuracy, five facial expressions along with their five correspondent emotional words were used to form congruent and incongruent pairs, respectively. Results and conclusions: There was a significant influence of emotional context; both groups made more mistakes in incongruent pairs than in congruent ones. The interaction of social anxiety groups and congruency implied that low social anxious participants were more prone to be influenced by emotional context than high social anxious participants. While facial expressions and emotional context both played a role in accuracy of facial expression recognition, high social anxious participants were less prone to be influenced by emotional context, which resulted in more precise in recognizing facial expressions. Besides, while situation manipulations did not made the difference significantly on accuracy of facial recognition, the reaction time for bogus-speech group was significantly longer than that in relaxed group under incongruent pairs. As to error rate, the misrecognition prone of contempt was different in the two social anxiety groups. High social anxious participants were more prone to recognize contempt as neutral than disgust, whereas low social anxious participants were prone to recognize contempt either as disgust or as neutral. According to our study, high social anxious participants were less prone to be influenced by emotion context, which indicated that in social conditions, high social anxious individuals might focus on negative social context and ignore other social contexts as well. Besides, high social anxious participants were more prone to recognize contempt as neutral, which might indicate the expectancy of non-threatening social reply. Taken together, when doing psychotherapy for social anxious individuals, the importance of enhancing their breadth of attention in collecting social information and desensitization of negative evaluation are discussed.
Subjects
social anxiety
recognition of facial expressions
emotional context
congruent and incongruent pairs
Type
thesis
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
Loading...
Name
ntu-100-R97227205-1.pdf
Size
23.54 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum
(MD5):7ade7d65a56b16e0938a3db253232a4e