Altered mechanisms of adaptation in social anxiety: differences in adapting to positive versus negative emotional faces

ABSTRACT

Social anxiety is characterised by fear of negative evaluation and negative perceptual biases; however, the cognitive mechanisms underlying these negative biases are not well understood. We investigated a possible mechanism which could maintain negative biases: altered adaptation to emotional faces. Heightened sensitivity to negative emotions could result from weakened adaptation to negative emotions, strengthened adaptation to positive emotions, or both mechanisms. We measured adaptation from repeated exposure to either positive or negative emotional faces, in individuals high versus low in social anxiety. We quantified adaptation strength by calculating the point of subjective equality (PSE) before and after adaptation for each participant. We hypothesised: (1) weaker adaptation to angry vs happy faces in individuals high in social anxiety, (2) no difference in adaptation to angry vs happy faces in individuals low in social anxiety, and (3) no difference in adaptation to sad vs happy faces in individuals high in social anxiety. Our results revealed a weaker adaptation to angry compared to happy faces in individuals high in social anxiety (Experiment 1), with no such difference in individuals low in social anxiety (Experiment 1), and no difference in adaptation strength to sad vs happy faces in individuals high in social anxiety (Experiment 2).

KEYWORDS:

• Faces
• emotions
• adaptation
• perceptual bias
• social anxiety

Acknowledgements

The authors thank a wonderful team of lab managers, Annalisa Groth Valadez and Daniel Paulus, as well as undergraduate research assistants, especially Justine Crowley, Rebecca Caruso, Anh Phan, Alexia Williams, Terrence Cook, and graduate student, Sarah Izen, for help with data collection and analysis. Finally, much of this work would not have been possible without support from the UMass Boston Dean’s Research Fund and the UMass Boston Department of Psychology Research Fund to vmc and sah-s and undergraduate student research funds to dah, jc, ap, aw, and tc. All authors declare that they have no conflict of interest and that this work has not been published previously.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by UMass Boston undergraduate research awards; UMass Boston Dean's Research Fund.