Biased recognition of happy facial expressions in social anxiety

Recognizing emotional expressions is central to understanding the feelings and intentions of other people. Little is known about how social anxiety affects the recognition of emotional expressions. Recent research finds a recognition advantage for happy expressions over negative expressions. In two...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of social and clinical psychology 2006-06, Vol.25 (6), p.585-602
Main Authors: SILVIA, Paul J, ALLAN, Wesley D, BEAUCHAMP, Daniel L, MASCHAUER, Emily L, WORKMAN, Jamie O
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult and adolescent clinical studies
Anxiety
Anxiety disorders. Neuroses
Biological and medical sciences
Emotional expressivity
Face
Face perception
Facial expressions
Happiness
Medical sciences
Mental health
Perception
Phobia
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychopathology. Psychiatry
Social anxiety
Social interaction
Social perception
Social psychology
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Summary:Recognizing emotional expressions is central to understanding the feelings and intentions of other people. Little is known about how social anxiety affects the recognition of emotional expressions. Recent research finds a recognition advantage for happy expressions over negative expressions. In two experiments, social anxiety moderated the recognition advantage of happy faces. People low and high in social anxiety recognized sad faces (Experiment 1) and angry faces (Experiment 2) equally quickly, but people high in social anxiety took longer to recognize happy faces. Both groups showed a significant recognition advantage for happy faces, although the advantage was at least twice as large in the low social-anxiety group. The discussion focuses on mechanisms connecting social anxiety to face processing and on the role of expression recognition in other emotional-processing biases. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
ISSN:0736-7236
1943-2771
DOI:10.1521/jscp.2006.25.6.585