Does social support protect against recognition of angry facial expressions following failure?

Abstract

Herein we examined the ability of perceived social support to modulate the recognition of facial expressions. Specifically, we hypothesised that perceived social support would serve as a “protective lens”, biasing individuals against recognition of angry faces and towards recognizing happy ones. Experimentally inducing failure and success in a performance task, we examined both main and interactive effects of perceived social support. Under experimentally induced failure, perceived social support was negatively associated with recognizing angry emotional face expression. Interestingly, we also found a trend toward a positive association between perceived social support and recognition of happy facial expression, irrespective of the failure/success experimental manipulation. These findings elucidate a potential link between social/personality and cognitive processes underlying the perception of emotional facial expression.

Keywords:

• Emotional face perception
• Perceived social support
• Angry expression
• Happy expression

Notes

¹ We used female students only, as a way to control for possible variance across participants.

² The “feeling like a failure” state item used as a manipulation check was part of the Emotion Questionnaire, a self-report measure assessing depressed affect (Zuroff & Mongrain, 1987). Participants rated their current experience of eight emotions (self-critical, satisfied with self, like a failure, loved, lonely, empty and worthless) using a 5-point scale that ranged from “Not at all” (1) to “Extremely” (5).

³ The use of 11% morph intervals was not deliberate and was due to a technical error that occurred during the creation of the images. For researches who may wish to use such a design we recommend 10% intervals.

⁴ We also conducted additional analyses using mean reaction time across the morph levels as a dependent variable. These analyses yielded null findings.

⁵ We also conducted an analysis in which we controlled for both depressive symptoms and general self-efficacy. Importantly, including these factors did not change the pattern of the results.