What is it about?
Increases in social anxiety seem to relate to the faster identification of other peoples fearful facial expressions, but also to the slower identification of other peoples happy facial expressions. This effect seems to be more pronounced when the facial expressions are less obvious. Thus, from this we can deduce that social anxiety enhances the ability to detect negative social signals, but impairs the ability to detect positive social signals.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
This research helps us to understand how other peoples emotion is perceived by those with non-clinical levels of social anxiety. This understanding will aid the development of future diagnostic aids and interventions that can be used with those who do have clinical levels of social anxiety.
Perspectives
Anxiety has been studied by psychologists for decades. However, our scientific understanding of how anxiety occurs, and what it actually does, is still in its infancy. Hopefully this article will encourage further research that looks at how social anxiety affects the identification of emotional facial expressions and/or other social signals.
Andrew du Rocher
Goldsmiths university of London
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The effects of social anxiety on emotional face discrimination and its modulation by mouth salience, Cognition & Emotion, May 2018, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/02699931.2018.1478279.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
