Interpretation of facial expressions and social anxiety: Specificity and source of biases

Abstract

Cognitive-behavioural models of social phobia (Clark & Wells, 1995; Rapee & Heimberg, 1997) propose that biased information processing contributes to the maintenance of social phobia. Given the importance of facial expressions in social interactions, recent investigations of these information-processing biases have increasingly used facial stimuli. The current study utilised schematic faces of emotional expressions to investigate interpretations of facial expressions and specific facial features in individuals with high and low social anxiety. Individuals with elevated social anxiety demonstrated biases in their perceptions of negative valence from the faces, whereas group differences were not observed for perceptions of activity or potency. Further, although the two groups generally utilised the same facial features to interpret facial expressions, the results suggested that individuals with high social anxiety may be more lenient in perceiving threat in faces than individuals without social anxiety.

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 39th annual meeting of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, Washington, DC, November 2005.

Notes

¹Use of the term “interpretation” herein is consistent with common usage: “to explain or tell the meaning of” (Merriam-Webster, 2007). However, it is worth noting that previous research has proposed the utility of distinguishing “interpretation” bias versus “judgement bias”, with the former referring to the disambiguation of ambiguous stimuli and the latter referring to estimates of the probability and/or cost of objective events (see Amir, Foa, & Coles, 1998). The potential applicability of this distinction (interpretation vs. judgement) to the current paradigm remains to be seen.

²The adjective pairs comprising the three semantic dimensions were as follows: Negative Valence: Unfriendly to Friendly, Cruel to Kind, Bad to Good, and Unpleasant to Pleasant. Activity: Excitable to Calm, Energetic to Inert, and Active to Passive. Potency: Tough to Fragile, Heavy to Light, Large to Small, and Strong to Weak.

³Further details are available from the first author upon request.

⁴The significant three-way interaction was not modified by a significant four-way interaction of Group×Eyebrow Shape×Mouth Shape×Eye Direction, F(2, 116) = 0.05, p=.96, and there were no other significant three-way interactions involving Group.