Relationship between Types of Anxiety and the Ability to Recognize Facial Expressions.

Abstract

The study aimed to examine whether three subtypes of anxiety (trait anxiety, state anxiety, and social anxiety) have different effects on recognition of common facial expressions of emotion. One hundred and thirty-eight participants were shown face images of six basic types of facial expressions with three levels of intensity (20%, 40%, 100%). They matched each face image with one of the six emotion labels (“happy”, “sad”, “fear”, “angry”, “disgust”, and “surprise”). When we used conventional method of analysis, we found significant correlations between each score of anxiety and recognition performance for facial expressions. However, when we used partial correlation to eliminate the complex effect of each anxiety, only the correlation between anxiety and categorization errors was significant. This was characterized by the tendency of miscategorizing a sad face as an angry face in social anxiety, and a surprised face as a disgusted face in trait anxiety and state anxiety. These results show that 154 Perception 50(1S) each subtype of anxiety differentially influenced on the recognition of facial expressions especially when the intensity of the expression is low. Our eye tracking data also show that state anxiety may be associated with reduced fixations on the eye regions of low-intensity sad or fearful faces. Results from our partial correlation analyses cast some doubts on some effects reported in the previous studies because they are likely to reflect a mixture of influence from the highly correlated anxiety subtypes.