Identification of emotional facial expressions among behaviorally inhibited adolescents with lifetime anxiety disorders

Abstract

The current study examined differences in emotion expression identification between adolescents characterised with behavioural inhibition (BI) in childhood with and without a lifetime history of anxiety disorder. Participants were originally assessed for BI during toddlerhood and for social reticence during childhood. During adolescence, participants returned to the laboratory and completed a facial emotion identification task and a clinical psychiatric interview. Results revealed that behaviorally inhibited adolescents with a lifetime history of anxiety disorder displayed a lower threshold for identifying fear relative to anger emotion expressions compared to non-anxious behaviorally inhibited adolescents and non-inhibited adolescents with or without anxiety. These findings were specific to behaviorally inhibited adolescents with a lifetime history of social anxiety disorder. Thus, adolescents with a history of both BI and anxiety, specifically social anxiety, are more likely to differ from other adolescents in their identification of fearful facial expressions. This offers further evidence that perturbations in the processing of emotional stimuli may underlie the aetiology of anxiety disorders.

Keywords:

• Temperament
• Social anxiety
• Face processing
• Recognition
• Children

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors thank the research staff who facilitated this work along with the children and their families for their continued participation in our studies.

This research was supported by National Institutes of Health [grants MH R01074454] and [HD R3717899] to NAF.

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors thank the research staff who facilitated this work along with the children and their families for their continued participation in our studies.

This research was supported by National Institutes of Health [grants MH R01074454] and [HD R3717899] to NAF.

Supplementary material

Supplementary Material (Supplemental Methods/Table 1) is available via the ‘Supplementary’ tab on the article’s online page (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2014.913552).