ABSTRACT
We investigate perception of, and responses to, facial expression authenticity for the first time in social anxiety, testing genuine and polite smiles. Experiment 1 (N = 141) found perception of smile authenticity was unaffected, but that approach ratings, which are known to be reduced in social anxiety for happy faces, are more strongly reduced for genuine than polite smiles. Moreover, we found an independent contribution of social anxiety to approach ratings, over and above general negative affect (state/trait anxiety, depression), only for genuine smiles, and not for polite ones. We argue this pattern of results can be explained by genuine smilers signalling greater potential for interaction – and thus greater potential for the scrutiny that is feared in social anxiety – than polite smiles. Experiment 2 established that, relative to polite smilers, genuine smilers are indeed perceived as friendlier and likely to want to talk for longer if approached. Critically, the degree to which individual face items were perceived as wanting to interact correlated strongly with the amount that social anxiety reduced willingness to approach in Experiment 1. We conclude it is the potential for social evaluation and scrutiny signalled by happy expressions, rather than their positive valence, that is important in social anxiety.
Acknowledgements
We thank Tamara Gradden for help with testing some participants and Dr Rachel Robbins for assistance with preparing data and figures.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
ORCID
Amy Dawel http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6668-3121
Richard O’Kearney http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7839-7920
Elinor McKone http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1655-4297
Notes
1 The sample overlaps with the N = 94 “average observer” sample Dawel et al. (Citation2017, Experiment 3) and N = 140 from Dawel et al. (Citationin press). Those articles do not include the key measures reported here (social anxiety, approach ratings).
2 The main effect of social anxiety group was also significant, F(1,139) = 8.03, MSE = 2.70, p = .005, = .06, but was uninformative in light of the significant interaction and t-test results. There was no significant main effect of smile type, F(1,139) = 0.43, MSE = 0.70, p = .514, < .01.
3 Intensity differences are difficult to avoid because intensity is in fact one of the physical cues that can contribute to perceiving a happy expression as genuine; Dawel et al., Citation2015).