Time course of attentional bias in social anxiety: The effects of spatial frequencies and individual threats

Hypervigilance and attentional bias to threat faces with low-spatial-frequency (LSF) information have been found in individuals with social anxiety. The vigilance–avoidance hypothesis posits that socially anxious individuals exhibit initial vigilance and later avoidance to threatening cues. However, the temporal dynamics of these two processes in response to various LSF threats in social anxiety remain unclear. In the current study, we presented faces containing anger, disgust, and fear in high and low spatial frequencies and compared the neural correlates with sensory perception and attention in individuals with high versus low social anxiety (HSA/LSA, n = 24). A visual search task was used to investigate the attentional effects of threats and spatial frequencies, and event-related potentials, particularly, the visual components of P1 and P250, were measured to index visual perceptual and attentional processes, respectively. We found that HSA individuals showed pronounced P1 and reduced P250 to LSF (vs. HSF) faces, regardless of emotion type, suggesting a general pattern of initial vigilance and later avoidance to LSF faces in social anxiety. Furthermore, while LSA individuals showed enhanced P250 to both fear and disgust (vs. neutral) faces, HSA individuals showed pronounced P250 to disgust faces alone. Our results, thus, elucidate the temporal profile of early vigilance and later avoidance in social anxiety, highlighting its broad implication for all faces and predominance in the low spatial frequency. Considering individual threats, our results demonstrate specific attentional avoidance of fear faces in social anxiety.     

Affective engagement for facial expressions and emotional scenes: the influence of social anxiety

Pictures of emotional facial expressions or natural scenes are often used as cues in emotion research. We examined the extent to which these different stimuli engage emotion and attention, and whether the presence of social anxiety symptoms influences responding to facial cues. Sixty participants reporting high or low social anxiety viewed pictures of angry, neutral, and happy faces, as well as violent, neutral, and erotic scenes, while skin conductance and event-related potentials were recorded. Acoustic startle probes were presented throughout picture viewing, and blink magnitude, probe P3 and reaction time to the startle probe also were measured. Results indicated that viewing emotional scenes prompted strong reactions in autonomic, central, and reflex measures, whereas pictures of faces were generally weak elicitors of measurable emotional response. However, higher social anxiety was associated with modest electrodermal changes when viewing angry faces and mild startle potentiation when viewing either angry or smiling faces, compared to neutral. Taken together, pictures of facial expressions do not strongly engage fundamental affective reactions, but these cues appeared to be effective in distinguishing between high and low social anxiety participants, supporting their use in anxiety research.     

The impact of the stimulus features and task instructions on facial processing in social anxiety: An ERP investigation

Social anxiety has been characterized by an attentional bias towards threatening faces. Electrophysiological studies have demonstrated modulations of cognitive processing from 100 ms after stimulus presentation. However, the impact of the stimulus features and task instructions on facial processing remains unclear. Event-related potentials were recorded while high and low socially anxious individuals performed an adapted Stroop paradigm that included a colour-naming task with non-emotional stimuli, an emotion-naming task (the explicit task) and a colour-naming task (the implicit task) on happy, angry and neutral faces. Whereas the impact of task factors was examined by contrasting an explicit and an implicit emotional task, the effects of perceptual changes on facial processing were explored by including upright and inverted faces. The findings showed an enhanced P1 in social anxiety during the three tasks, without a moderating effect of the type of task or stimulus. These results suggest a global modulation of attentional processing in performance situations.     

Reduced sensitivity in the recognition of anger and disgust in social anxiety disorder

Introduction. The aim of this study was to investigate the recognition of facial expressions in patients with a generalised social anxiety disorder. It is well documented that in different psychiatric disorders (e.g., depression, schizophrenia) patients may show an altered processing of emotions. However, in generalised social anxiety, emotion recognition has not been studied.

Methods. 24 Patients with generalised social anxiety disorder and 26 healthy controls, matched on age, education, and sex were included. The task entailed the emotional labelling of faces with different facial expressions (happiness, fear, disgust, sadness, surprise, anger) presented in different intensities. Subjects were asked to make a forced‐choice response.

Results. These revealed that patients with a generalised social anxiety disorder were less sensitive for the negative facial expressions of anger and disgust compared to the control group.

Conclusions. This deficit could play a role in the development and/or the maintaining of the social anxiety. Both explanations are discussed.     

The psychophysiology of social anxiety: Emotional modulation of the startle reflex during socially-relevant and -irrelevant pictures

The present study examined affective processes of social anxiety (SA) through emotional modulation of the startle reflex. Eighty-four high and low trait socially anxious undergraduates viewed socially-relevant and socially-irrelevant pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant pictures, and acoustic startle probes were presented during pictures and the inter-trial interval. Startle was potentiated during unpleasant compared to pleasant stimuli, but this valence modulation did not reliably vary between groups or socially-relevant and -irrelevant stimuli. However, when participants were categorized based on public-speaking fears rather than general SA symptoms, the high fear group demonstrated reliable valence modulation, whereas the low fear group did not. These findings are interpreted within the context of the broader literature suggesting that the specificity of fear in SA may influence psychophysiological reactivity.     

Emotion recognition: facial components associated with various emotions

This study examined the effect of the changes in facial expressions in different parts of the face on emotion recognition. Fifty-two university students participated in the study. Seven emotions were selected as being the most suitable for categorization and expression: namely, anger, fear, surprise, disgust, sadness, happiness, and neutrality. Picture of these emotions were used to create stimulus materials, composed facial expressions were created by combining the upper and the lower parts of the pictures expressing different emotions. The participants were asked to categorize the type of emotion represented by each picture. The results showed that the upper area of the face was more often associated with anger, fear, surprise, and sadness. On the contrary, the lower area was more often associated with disgust and happiness. There were no significant differences between parts of the face associated with neutral emotions. Based on these results, we conclude that affected areas of the face differed as a function of emotion being experienced. Finally, the relationship of our results with Yamada's model (1993) was discussed.     

Cynical hostility and the accuracy of decoding facial expressions of emotions

To examine the relation between cynical hostility and the accuracy of decoding facial expressions of emotions, 101 young adult participants completed the Cook-Medley Hostility Scale and Ekman's Pictures of Facial Affect. Results revealed that higher hostility scores were correlated with a greater number of errors in decoding facial expressions of emotions. Hostile individuals were more likely than nonhostile individuals to label inaccurately facial expressions of "disgust" as being "anger" and of "happiness" as being "neutral." Results also revealed that males were more likely than females to label incorrectly facial expressions of disgust as anger. Partial correlations, controlling for gender, revealed that the relation between hostility and inaccurate perceptions of facial portrayals of happiness was significant, whereas the relation between hostility and inaccurate perceptions of facial displays of disgust was no longer significant.     

Decreased P3 amplitudes elicited by negative facial emotion in manic patients: Selective deficits in emotional processing

Manic patients have impairments in recognizing negative emotional stimuli. However, there have been few studies on manic patients’ neurophysiological responses to facial emotions. We measured the P3 event-related potentials using facial emotional stimuli to investigate whether the impairment in recognition of negative emotions is greater in maniac patients. We recruited twenty manic patients and twenty controls. A visual oddball paradigm was used with facial pictures: happy, neutral, sad, fear, and disgust emotions. While P3 amplitudes of emotional stimuli were significantly larger than those of neutral stimuli in controls, the amplitudes were not significantly different from those for neutral pictures in manic patients. Repeated-measures analysis of variance on P3 amplitudes revealed significant interaction effects of paired emotions as sad-neutral, disgust-neutral, fear-neutral, but not in the happy-neutral emotion pairs. These differential P3 responses suggest that manic patients may have abnormal neurophysiological activity when evaluating negative facial emotions. Thus, these findings may give the evidence for reduced negative emotion recognition of manic patients.     

Discrimination thresholds for recognizing facial emotions: mostly higher among the elderly

Elderly people have lower ability for recognizing facial emotions than younger people. Previous studies showed that older adults had difficulty in recognizing anger, sadness and fear, but there were no consistent results for happiness, surprise and disgust. Most of these studies used a small number of stimuli, and tabulated the number of correct responses for facial expressions. These characteristics of the task might be the source of the discrepancy in the findings. The present study used a task which measures participants' discrimination thresholds for six basic emotions using psychophysical measurement methods. The results showed that the thresholds for elderly participants (74.8 +/- 6.5 yrs) were significantly higher than for younger participants (20.1 +/- 1.6 yrs) for sadness, surprise, anger, disgust and fear. There was no significant difference for happiness. Since the task that we developed was sufficiently sensitive, it is a useful tool for assessing individuals' ability to perceive emotion.     

Concordance of facial reactions to facial expressions

Participants watching a facial expression of emotion tend to respond with the same facial expression. This facial concordance is well known for happiness, but not for other emotions. The present study investigated whether facial expressions of basic six emotions induce facial concordance in participants by average-face method. Facial reactions of 20 subjects were videotaped while watching a facial expression of six emotions performed by amateur actors in a computer display. The six average faces were made from corresponding facial expression of emotions in the display. Newly chosen 62 subjects were asked to classify those average faces into six categories of emotion. The facial concordance was found for happiness and surprise, but not for disgust and fear. However, for average face of anger and that of sadness, classifications were divided into a few categories. This result suggests a possibility that an average faces might have included ambiguous or different faces. It may be necessary to conduct re-classification not with the average-face but with individual faces.     

Toward an understanding of the emotion‐modulated startle eyeblink reflex: The case of anger

Three studies investigated the effect of angering pictures on the startle eyeblink response, based on anger's unique identity as an approach‐oriented negative affect. In Study 1, eyeblinks to startling noise probes during angering and neutral pictures did not differ, despite angering pictures being rated higher on arousal and anger and more negative in valence. Study 2 replicated Study 1; also, dysphoric participants exhibited potentiated eyeblinks to probes during angering pictures much like those to probes during fear/disgust stimuli. A follow‐up study revealed that dysphoric participants rated angering pictures higher in fear. Study 3 again found that eyeblinks to probes during angering and neutral pictures did not differ. Taken together, these results suggest that probes during angering stimuli elicit eyeblinks much like those during neutral stimuli, perhaps due to the competing influences of arousal, valence, and motivation on the startle eyeblink reflex.     

Trait anger predicts relative left frontal cortical activation to anger-inducing stimuli.

Building on past research that has suggested that relatively greater left frontal cortical activity is associated with approach-related anger and that individuals who are high in trait anger are more likely to evidence angry responses, the present research tested whether individuals high in trait anger would be more likely to evidence relatively greater left frontal cortical activity in response to anger-eliciting pictorial stimuli. In the experiment, participants were exposed to pictures intended to evoke anger, fear/disgust, positive, or neutral affective reactions. Electroencephalographic (EEG) activity was recorded continuously, and alpha power was derived from the EEG to measure cortical activity. Trait anger was measured using the Buss and Perry Aggression Questionnaire [Buss, A.H., Perry, M., 1992. The aggression questionnaire. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 452-459]. Results revealed that trait anger was positively related to greater relative left frontal cortical activity to anger-evoking pictures but not to other types of pictures.     

Brain oscillations and BIS/BAS (behavioral inhibition/activation system) effects on processing masked emotional cues.: ERS/ERD and coherence measures of alpha band

Alpha brain oscillation modulation was analyzed in response to masked emotional facial expressions. In addition, behavioural activation (BAS) and behavioural inhibition systems (BIS) were considered as an explicative factor to verify the effect of motivational significance on cortical activity. Nineteen subjects were submitted to an ample range of facial expressions of emotions (anger, fear, surprise, disgust, happiness, sadness, and neutral). The results demonstrated that anterior frontal sites were more active than central and posterior sites in response to facial stimuli. Moreover, right-side responses varied as a function of emotional types, with an increased right-frontal activity for negative emotions. Finally, whereas higher BIS subjects generated a more right hemisphere activation for some negative emotions (such as fear, anger, and surprise), Reward-BAS subjects were more responsive to positive emotion (happiness) within the left hemisphere. Valence and potential threatening power of facial expressions were considered to elucidate these cortical differences.     

Effects of believes and expectations about self and others on emotional recognition of facial expressions: from the perspective of adult attachment

This study aimed at examining how adult attachment styles as believes and expectations about self and others affected emotional recognition of facial expressions. In this study, hypotheses were framed based on the perspective of attachment dimensions. One hundred and sixty one undergraduates observed positive, negative, and neutral facial expressions as stimulus, and rated the extent to which each stimuli expressed several kinds of emotion. The main results were as follows. Generally, either anxious or avoidant individuals were less likely to perceive positive emotion (happy) from facial expressions, and anxious and less avoidant individuals perceived other-oriented negative emotions (anger, disgust, and contempt). In addition, avoidant individuals were less likely to perceive positive emotion from positive facial expressions. On the other hand, from negative facial expressions, anxious and less avoidant individuals were more likely to perceive other-oriented negative emotions, and anxious individuals were less likely to perceive positive emotion. The results were discussed from the perspective of adult attachment theory.     

Early somatosensory event-related potentials reveal attentional bias for internal stimuli in social anxiety

The present study used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate allocation of attentional resources to internal and external stimuli in individuals with social anxiety. High and low socially anxious individuals were presented with depictions of various facial expressions or household objects, followed by an internal (vibration presented to the finger) or external probe (the letter "E"). Participants were told that the vibration signals physiological changes and were asked to detect both probes. High socially anxious individuals showed larger front-central N140 amplitudes in response to vibratory internal probes as compared to non-anxious controls. ERPs elicited by picture stimuli and external probes and reaction times in response to both probe types did not differ between high and low social anxiety individuals. Early somatosensory ERPs reveal an attentional bias for internal stimuli that does not appear in overt behavior.     

Facial expression recognition and emotional regulation in narcolepsy with cataplexy

Cataplexy is pathognomonic of narcolepsy with cataplexy, and defined by a transient loss of muscle tone triggered by strong emotions. Recent researches suggest abnormal amygdala function in narcolepsy with cataplexy. Emotion treatment and emotional regulation strategies are complex functions involving cortical and limbic structures, like the amygdala. As the amygdala has been shown to play a role in facial emotion recognition, we tested the hypothesis that patients with narcolepsy with cataplexy would have impaired recognition of facial emotional expressions compared with patients affected with central hypersomnia without cataplexy and healthy controls. We also aimed to determine whether cataplexy modulates emotional regulation strategies. Emotional intensity, arousal and valence ratings on Ekman faces displaying happiness, surprise, fear, anger, disgust, sadness and neutral expressions of 21 drug‐free patients with narcolepsy with cataplexy were compared with 23 drug‐free sex‐, age‐ and intellectual level‐matched adult patients with hypersomnia without cataplexy and 21 healthy controls. All participants underwent polysomnography recording and multiple sleep latency tests, and completed depression, anxiety and emotional regulation questionnaires. Performance of patients with narcolepsy with cataplexy did not differ from patients with hypersomnia without cataplexy or healthy controls on both intensity rating of each emotion on its prototypical label and mean ratings for valence and arousal. Moreover, patients with narcolepsy with cataplexy did not use different emotional regulation strategies. The level of depressive and anxious symptoms in narcolepsy with cataplexy did not differ from the other groups. Our results demonstrate that narcolepsy with cataplexy accurately perceives and discriminates facial emotions, and regulates emotions normally. The absence of alteration of perceived affective valence remains a major clinical interest in narcolepsy with cataplexy, and it supports the argument for optimal behaviour and social functioning in narcolepsy with cataplexy.     

Common and specific brain responses to scenic emotional stimuli

Processing of emotions has been an enduring topic of interest in neuroimaging research, but studies have mostly used facial emotional stimuli. The aim of this study was to determine neural networks involved in emotion processing using scenic emotional visual stimuli. One hundred and twenty photographs from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS), including ecological scenes of disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness, were presented to 40 healthy participants while they underwent functional magnetic imaging resonance (fMRI). Afterwards they evaluated the emotional content of the pictures in an offline task. The occipito-temporal cortex and the amygdala–hippocampal complex showed a non-specific emotion-related activation, which was more marked in response to negative emotions than to happiness. The temporo-parietal cortex and the ventral anterior cingulate gyrus showed deactivation, with the former being marked for all emotions except fear and the latter being most marked for disgust. The fusiform gyrus showed activation in response to disgust and deactivation in response to happiness or sadness. Brain regions involved in processing of scenic emotion therefore resemble those reported for facial expressions of emotion in that they respond to a range of different emotions, although there appears to be specificity in the intensity and direction of the response.     

Stimulus type and design influence hemodynamic responses towards visual disgust and fear elicitors.

The question to what extent emotion-related brain activation depends upon the presentation design (block design vs. event-related design) and the stimulus type (scene pictures vs. pictures with facial mimic) has hardly been addressed in previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research. In the present fMRI experiment, 40 right-handed subjects viewed pictures with fear-inducing and disgust-inducing content as well as facial expressions of fear and disgust. Pictures of neutral objects and neutral facial mimic were used as control stimuli. The pictures were presented in a block design for half of the subjects; the other half viewed the same stimuli as singular events in randomized sequence. The participants had been instructed to passively view the pictures. Disgust-evoking scenes provoked activation in the amygdala, the insula and the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). This applied to the blocked as well as to the event-related design. Fear-relevant scenes were associated with activity in the insula, the OFC and the middle temporal gyri in the event-related design. The presentation in a block design only led to activation in the middle temporal gyri. Facial expressions of disgust and fear did not trigger significant activation neither in the blocked nor event-related design. This surprising outcome may be a result of context and task effects. The face stimuli which were presented together with the more complex scenes in a passive viewing paradigm possibly were not salient enough to trigger emotional processing.     

Threatening faces and social anxiety: A literature review

A threatening facial expression is a potent social sign of hostility or dominance. During the past 20 years, photographs of threatening faces have been increasingly included as stimuli in studies with socially anxious participants, based on the hypothesis that a threatening face is especially salient to people with fears of social interaction or negative evaluation. The purpose of this literature review is to systematically evaluate the accumulated research and suggest possible avenues for further research. The main conclusion is that photographs of threatening faces engage a broad range of perceptual processes in socially anxious participants, particularly when exposure times are very short.     

Reactions to facial expressions: effects of social context and speech anxiety on responses to neutral, anger, and joy expressions

Male and female participants (n=19) high or low in speech fear viewed pictures of faces posed in anger, neutral, and joyful expressions for 8s each. Zygomaticus major and corrugator supercilii EMG, skin conductance, and heart rate were measured during picture viewing, and subjective ratings were made after each picture. Compared to anger expressions, joy expressions were responded to with greater zygomatic EMG, less corrugator EMG, and greater heart rate and skin conductance. Physiological response to neutral expressions was similar to response to anger expressions. Expressions posed by women were responded to physiologically more negatively than expressions posed by men. More fearful participants exhibited more negative and less positive facial expressions, and skin conductance responses suggesting greater attention when viewing negative expressions. Results suggest that reactions to facial expressions are influenced by social context, and are not simple mimicry.