The effects of emotion priming on visual search in socially anxious adults

ABSTRACT

This study examined the effects of emotion priming on visual search in participants characterised for different levels of social anxiety. Participants were primed with five facial emotions (angry, fear, happy, neutral, and surprised) and one scrambled face immediately prior to visual search trials involving finding a slanted coloured line amongst distractors, as reaction times and accuracy to target detection were recorded. Results suggest that for individuals low in social anxiety, being primed with an angry, surprised, or fearful face facilitated visual search compared to being primed with scrambled, neutral or happy faces. However, these same emotions degraded visual search in participants with high levels of social anxiety. This study expands on previous research on the impact of emotion on attention, finding that amongst socially anxious individuals, the effects of priming with threat extend beyond initial attention capture or disengagement, degrading later visual search.

KEYWORDS:

• Threat
• social anxiety
• visual search
• emotion
• selective attention
• facial expressions

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the individuals who participated in the study. We would like to thank Kelley Gunther, Laurel Gordon and Leena Owen for helping with data collection. We would also like to thank Dr. Koraly Perez-Edgar for her feedback on the manuscript. We would also like to acknowledge Natasha Katoni’s work as an Honors Thesis student in Dima Amso’s lab on a previous iteration of this task.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Each Linear Mixed Model was computed using SPSS 23.0, and utilised the diagonal covariance structure for the repeated fixed-effects, and identity covariance structure for the participant random effect. Each model was fitted using the restricted maximum likelihood (REML) criterion. The model was estimated using alternative covariance structures, and while the autoregressive and factor analytic structures also converged, inferences remained the same for other structures with little or no differences in model fit. The final model fit using the diagonal covariance structure for the repeated effect, as measured by Akaike's Information Criterion (AIC), was 1523.74, and for Schwarz's Bayesian Criterion (BIC), 1551.70.

2 The same model was run using a median split of LSAS scores group analysis and yielded the same results.

3 The same model was run using the Neutral Slope condition as the reference, and yielded the same results

Additional information

Funding

The first author received support from the NICHD Training Program in Social Development Grant (NIH T32 HD007542) awarded to the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology at the University of Maryland by the National Institutes of Health’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.