Speech anxiety and rapid emotional reactions to angry and happy facial expressions

The aim was to explore whether people high as opposed to low in speech anxiety react with a more pronounced differential facial response when exposed to angry and happy facial stimuli. High and low fear participants were selected based on their scores on a fear of public speaking questionnaire. All participants were exposed to pictures of angry and happy faces while facial electromyographic (EMG) activity from the Corrugator supercilii and the Zygomaticus major muscle regions was recorded. Skin conductance responses (SCR), heart rate (HR) and ratings were also collected. Participants high as opposed to low in speech anxiety displayed a larger differential corrugator responding, indicating a larger negative emotional reaction, between angry and happy faces. They also reacted with a larger differential zygomatic responding, indicating a larger positive emotional reaction, between happy and angry faces. Consistent with the facial reaction patterns, the high fear group rated angry faces as more unpleasant and as expressing more disgust, and further rated happy faces as more pleasant. There were no differences in SCR or HR responding between high and low speech anxiety groups. The present results support the hypothesis that people high in speech anxiety are disposed to show an exaggerated sensitivity and facial responsiveness to social stimuli.     

Social fear and expressive reactions to social stimuli

This study explored whether subjects high as compared to low in social fear react with a more negative emotional response, measured as facial electromyographic (EMG) activity, when exposed to social stimuli (pictures of angry and happy facial expressions). It was found that subjects who rated themselves as relatively high in public speaking fear gave larger negative facial EMG responses (Corrugator supercilii muscle activity) to angry faces than did the low fear subjects. Low fear subjects, on the other hand, gave larger positive facial EMG responses (Zygomatic major muscle activity) to happy faces than did the high fear subjects. It was further found that happy stimuli were rated as more hostile and less friendly and happy by the high fear group. Consistent with earlier findings, it was concluded that the facial EMG technique is sensitive to detecting different reactions among subjects relatively high and low in social fear.     

Differences in startle reactivity during the perception of angry and fearful faces

Emotion researchers often categorize angry and fearful face stimuli as "negative" or "threatening". Perception of fear and anger, however, appears to be mediated by dissociable neural circuitries and often elicit distinguishable behavioral responses. The authors sought to elucidate whether viewing anger and fear expressions produce dissociable psychophysiological responses (i.e., the startle reflex). The results of two experiments using different facial stimulus sets (representing anger, fear, neutral, and happy) indicated that viewing anger was associated with a significantly heightened startle response (p < .05) relative to viewing fear, happy, and neutral. This finding suggests that while anger and fear faces convey messages of "threat", their priming effect on startle circuitry differs. Thus, angry expressions, representing viewer-directed threat with an unambiguous source (i.e., the expresser), may more effectively induce a motivational propensity to withdraw or escape. The source of threat is comparatively less clear for fearful faces. The differential effects of these two facial threat signals on the defensive motivational system adds to growing literature highlighting the importance of distinguishing between emotional stimuli of similar valence, along lines of meaning and functional impact.     

The influence of social category cues on the happy categorisation advantage depends on expression valence

Facial race and sex cues can influence the magnitude of the happy categorisation advantage. It has been proposed that implicit race or sex based evaluations drive this influence. Within this account a uniform influence of social category cues on the happy categorisation advantage should be observed for all negative expressions. Support has been shown with angry and sad expressions but evidence to the contrary has been found for fearful expressions. To determine the generality of the evaluative congruence account, participants categorised happiness with either sadness, fear, or surprise displayed on White male as well as White female, Black male, or Black female faces across three experiments. Faster categorisation of happy than negative expressions was observed for female faces when presented among White male faces, and for White male faces when presented among Black male faces. These results support the evaluative congruence account when both positive and negative expressions are presented.     

Rapid facial reactions to emotional facial expressions in typically developing children and children with autism spectrum disorder

Typical adults mimic facial expressions within 1000 ms, but adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) do not. These rapid facial reactions (RFRs) are associated with the development of social-emotional abilities. Such interpersonal matching may be caused by motor mirroring or emotional responses. Using facial electromyography (EMG), this study evaluated mechanisms underlying RFRs during childhood and examined possible impairment in children with ASD. Experiment 1 found RFRs to happy and angry faces (not fear faces) in 15 typically developing children from 7 to 12 years of age. RFRs of fear (not anger) in response to angry faces indicated an emotional mechanism. In 11 children (8-13 years of age) with ASD, Experiment 2 found undifferentiated RFRs to fear expressions and no consistent RFRs to happy or angry faces. However, as children with ASD aged, matching RFRs to happy faces increased significantly, suggesting the development of processes underlying matching RFRs during this period in ASD.     

Facial reactions to facial expressions in subjects high and low in public speaking fear

This study investigated whether subjects high and low in public speaking fear react with different facial electromyographic (EMG) activities when exposed to negative and positive social stimuli. A High-fear and Low-fear group were selected by help of a questionnaire and were exposed to slides of angry and happy faces while facial-EMG from the corrugator and zygomatic muscle regions were measured. The subjects also rated the stimuli on different emotional dimensions. Consistent with earlier research it was found that Low fear subjects reacted with increased corrugator activity to angry faces and increased zygomatic activity to happy faces. The High fear group, on the other hand, did not distinguish between angry and happy faces. Rating data indicated that the High fear group perceived angry faces as being emotionally more negative. The present results are consistent with earlier studies, indicating that the facial-EMG technique is sensitive to detect differential responding among clinical interesting groups, such as people suffering from social fears.     

Understanding associations between negatively biased attention and depression and social anxiety: positively biased attention is key

ABSTRACT

Background and objectives: Although research supports the premise that depressed and socially anxious individuals direct attention preferentially toward negative emotional cues, little is known about how attention to positive emotional cues might modulate this negative attention bias risk process. The purpose of this study was to determine if associations between attention biases to sad and angry faces and depression and social anxiety symptoms, respectively, would be strongest in individuals who also show biased attention away from happy faces.

Methods: Young adults (N?=?151; 79% female; M?=?19.63 years) completed self-report measures of depression and social anxiety symptoms and a dot probe task to assess attention biases to happy, sad, and angry facial expressions.

Results: Attention bias to happy faces moderated associations between attention to negatively valenced faces and psychopathology symptoms. However, attention bias toward sad faces was positively and significantly related to depression symptoms only for individuals who also selectively attended toward happy faces. Similarly, attention bias toward angry faces was positively and significantly associated with social anxiety symptoms only for individuals who also selectively attended toward happy faces.

Conclusions: These findings suggest that individuals with high levels of depression or social anxiety symptoms attend preferentially to emotional stimuli across valences.     

Looking for foes and friends: perceptual and emotional factors when finding a face in the crowd

In a face-in-the-crowd setting, the authors examined visual search for photographically reproduced happy, angry, and fearful target faces among neutral distractor faces in 3 separate experiments. Contrary to the hypothesis, happy targets were consistently detected more quickly and accurately than angry and fearful targets, as were directed compared with averted targets. There was no consistent effect of social anxiety. A facial emotion recognition experiment suggested that the happy search advantage could be due to the ease of processing happy faces. In the final experiment with perceptually controlled schematic faces, the authors reported more effective detection of angry than happy faces. This angry advantage was most obvious for highly socially anxious individuals when their social fear was experimentally enhanced.     

The effects of happy and angry expressions on identity and expression memory for unfamiliar faces

We investigated the influence of happy and angry expressions on memory for new faces. Participants were presented with happy and angry faces in an intentional or incidental learning condition and were later asked to recognise the same faces displaying a neutral expression. They also had to remember what the initial expressions of the faces had been. Remember/know/guess judgements were made both for identity and expression memory. Results showed that faces were better recognised when presented with a happy rather than an angry expression, but only when learning was intentional. This was mainly due to an increase of the "remember" responses for happy faces when encoding was intentional rather than incidental. In contrast, memory for emotional expressions was not different for happy and angry faces whatever the encoding conditions. We interpret these findings according to the social meaning of emotional expressions for the self.     

Neural and behavioral correlates of emotion recognition in children and adults.

Event-related potentials (ERPs), accuracy scores, and reaction times were used to examine the recognition of emotional expressions. Adults and 7-year-old children saw upright and inverted chromatic slides of the facial expressions of happiness, fear, surprise, and anger, and were asked to press a button for either "happy" or "angry" faces. A positive-going waveform (P300) was apparent at parietal scalp (Pz) and at left and right temporal scalp. Although the behavioral data were similar for both children and adults (e.g., both had more difficulty recognizing angry expressions than happy ones, and angry expressions were more difficult to recognize upside-down than were happy faces), the ERPs indicated that children responded differently than adults did to happy and angry expressions. Adults showed greater P300 amplitude to happy faces, while children showed greater P300 amplitude to angry faces. In addition, for adults, but not children, there were greater P300 amplitude responses at right vs. left temporal scalp.     

The time-course of visual threat processing: High trait anxious individuals eventually avert their gaze from angry faces

Several experiments have shown that anxious individuals have an attentional bias towards threat cues. It is also known, however, that exposure to a subjectively threatening but relatively harmless stimulus tends to lead to a reduction in fear. Accordingly, some authors have hypothesised that high trait anxious individuals have a vigilant-avoidant pattern of visual attention to threatening stimuli. In the present study, 52 high trait anxious and 48 low trait anxious subjects were shown pairs of emotional faces, while their direction of gaze was continuously monitored. For 0-1000 ms, both groups were found to view angry faces more than happy faces. For 2000-3000 ms, however, only high trait anxious subjects averted their gaze from angry faces more than they did from happy faces.     

A tale of two negatives: differential memory modulation by threat-related facial expressions

Facial expressions serve as cues that encourage viewers to learn about their immediate environment. In studies assessing the influence of emotional cues on behavior, fearful and angry faces are often combined into one category, such as "threat-related," because they share similar emotional valence and arousal properties. However, these expressions convey different information to the viewer. Fearful faces indicate the increased probability of a threat, whereas angry expressions embody a certain and direct threat. This conceptualization predicts that a fearful face should facilitate processing of the environment to gather information to disambiguate the threat. Here, we tested whether fearful faces facilitated processing of neutral information presented in close temporal proximity to the faces. In Experiment 1, we demonstrated that, compared with neutral faces, fearful faces enhanced memory for neutral words presented in the experimental context, whereas angry faces did not. In Experiment 2, we directly compared the effects of fearful and angry faces on subsequent memory for emotional faces versus neutral words. We replicated the findings of Experiment 1 and extended them by showing that participants remembered more faces from the angry face condition relative to the fear condition, consistent with the notion that anger differs from fear in that it directs attention toward the angry individual. Because these effects cannot be attributed to differences in arousal or valence processing, we suggest they are best understood in terms of differences in the predictive information conveyed by fearful and angry facial expressions.     

Emotional expression affects the accuracy of gaze perception

Emotional facial expressions are powerful social cues. Here we investigated how emotional expression affects the interpretation of eye gaze direction. Fifty-two observers judged where faces were looking by moving a slider on a measuring bar to the respective position. The faces displayed either an angry, happy, fearful or a neutral expression and were looking either straight at the observer, or were rotated 2°, 4°, 6° or 8° to the left and right. We found that happy faces were interpreted as directed closer to the observer, while fearful and angry faces were interpreted as directed further away. Judgments were most accurate for neutral faces, followed by happy, angry and fearful faces. These findings are discussed on the background of the “self-referential positivity bias”, suggesting that happy faces are preferably interpreted as directed towards the self while negative emotions are interpreted as directed further away.     

Selective attention to angry faces in clinical social phobia

This study investigated the time course of attentional responses to emotional facial expressions in a clinical sample with social phobia. With a visual probe task, photographs of angry, happy, and neutral faces were presented at 2 exposure durations: 500 and 1250 ms. At 500 ms, the social phobia group showed enhanced vigilance for angry faces, relative to happy and neutral faces, in comparison with normal controls. In the 1250-ms condition, there were no significant attentional biases in the social phobia group. Results are consistent with a bias in initial orienting to threat cues in social anxiety. Findings are discussed in relation to recent cognitive models of anxiety disorders.     

Anxiety and error monitoring: Increased error sensitivity or altered expectations?

This study tested the prediction that the error-related negativity (ERN), a physiological measure of error monitoring, would be enhanced in anxious individuals, particularly in conditions with threatening cues. Participants made gender judgments about faces whose expressions were either happy, angry, or neutral. Replicating prior studies, midline scalp negativities were greater following errors than following correct responses. In addition, state anxiety interacted with facial expression to predict ERN amplitudes. Counter to predictions, participants high in state anxiety displayed smaller ERNs for angry-face blocks and larger ERNs for happy-face blocks, compared to less anxious participants. These results are inconsistent with the simple notion that anxiety enhances error sensitivity globally. Rather, we interpret the findings within an expectancy violation framework, in which anxious participants have altered expectations for success and failure in the context of happy and angry facial cues, with greater ERN amplitudes when expectations are violated.     

Emotional contrast and psychological function impact response inhibition to threatening faces

Poor inhibitory control over negative emotional information has been identified as a possible contributor to affective disorders, but the distinct effects of emotional contrast and fearful versus angry faces on response inhibition remain unknown. In the present study, young adults completed an emotional go/no-go task involving happy, neutral, and either fearful or angry faces. Results did not reveal differences in accuracy or speed between angry and fearful face conditions. However, responses were slower and indicated poorer inhibition in blocks where threatening faces were paired with happy, versus neutral, faces. Results may reflect cognitive load of emotional valence contrast, such that higher contrast blocks (containing threatening with happy faces) produced more conflict and required more processing than lower contrast blocks (threatening with neutral faces). Preliminary findings also revealed higher anxiety and depression symptoms corresponded with slower responses and worse accuracy, consistent with patterns of adverse impacts of anxiety and depression on response inhibition to threatening faces, even at subclinical levels of symptomatology.     

Gaze direction differentially affects avoidance tendencies to happy and angry faces in socially anxious individuals

Increasing evidence indicates that eye gaze direction affects the processing of emotional faces in anxious individuals. However, the effects of eye gaze direction on the behavioral responses elicited by emotional faces, such as avoidance behavior, remain largely unexplored. We administered an Approach-Avoidance Task (AAT) in high (HSA) and low socially anxious (LSA) individuals. All participants responded to photographs of angry, happy and neutral faces (presented with direct and averted gaze), by either pushing a joystick away from them (avoidance) or pulling it towards them (approach). Compared to LSA, HSA were faster in avoiding than approaching angry faces. Most crucially, this avoidance tendency was only present when the perceived anger was directed towards the subject (direct gaze) and not when the gaze of the face-stimulus was averted. In contrast, HSA individuals tended to avoid happy faces irrespectively of gaze direction. Neutral faces elicited no approach-avoidance tendencies. Thus avoidance of angry faces in social anxiety as measured by AA-tasks reflects avoidance of subject-directed anger and not of negative stimuli in general. In addition, although both anger and joy are considered to reflect approach-related emotions, gaze direction did not affect HSA's avoidance of happy faces, suggesting differential mechanisms affecting responses to happy and angry faces in social anxiety.     

Don’t make me angry,you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry: Volitional choices to act or inhibit are modulated by subliminal perception of emotional faces

Volitional action and self-control—feelings of acting according to one’s own intentions and in being control of one’s own actions—are fundamental aspects of human conscious experience. However, it is unknown whether high-level cognitive control mechanisms are affected by socially salient but nonconscious emotional cues. In this study, we manipulated free choice decisions to act or withhold an action by subliminally presenting emotional faces: In a novel version of the Go/NoGo paradigm, participants made speeded button-press responses to Go targets, withheld responses to NoGo targets, and made spontaneous, free choices to execute or withhold the response for Choice targets. Before each target, we presented emotional faces, backwards masked to render them nonconscious. In Intentional trials, subliminal angry faces made participants more likely to voluntarily withhold the action, whereas fearful and happy faces had no effects. In a second experiment, the faces were made supraliminal, which eliminated the effects of angry faces on volitional choices. A third experiment measured neural correlates of the effects of subliminal angry faces on intentional choice using EEG. After replicating the behavioural results found in Experiment 1, we identified a frontal-midline theta component—associated with cognitive control processes—which is present for volitional decisions, and is modulated by subliminal angry faces. This suggests a mechanism whereby subliminally presented “threat” stimuli affect conscious control processes. In summary, nonconscious perception of angry faces increases choices to inhibit, and subliminal influences on volitional action are deep seated and ecologically embedded.     

A preliminary study of medial temporal lobe function in youths with a history of caregiver deprivation and emotional neglect

Previous research findings have linked caregiver deprivation and emotional neglect with sensitivity to threatening cues. The present preliminary study investigated whether dysfunctions of the medial temporal lobe could underlie these associations. Using fMRI, we measured medial temporal lobe responses to emotional faces (angry, fearful, happy, neutral) among 30 youths. Eleven of the youths had a history of caregiver deprivation and emotional neglect. Attention states (i.e., attention to anger, fear, or physical attributes, or passive viewing) were systematically manipulated. Relative to comparison youths, youths with a history of caregiver deprivation and emotional neglect showed significantly greater left amygdala and left anterior hippocampus activation during the processing of threatening information. To our knowledge, these findings are the first to demonstrate altered medial temporal lobe function during the processing of threat cues in youths with a history of caregiver deprivation and emotional neglect.     

Psychophysiological and subjective reactions of social phobics and normals to facial stimuli

Nine social phobics and 9 normal control subjects were exposed to slides of angry faces, happy faces, and neutral objects (i.e. flowers or mushrooms). Skin conductance responses (SCRs) to the stimuli and eyeblink rate (EBR) during stimulus exposure were recorded. In addition, subjects were asked to rate the stimuli in terms of pleasantness. While angry face stimuli elicited greater SCRs, stronger inhibition of EBR, and were evaluated more negatively than the other stimuli, there were no differences between social phobics and normals in these respects. Thus, the findings lend no support to the idea that social phobics are particularly sensitive to facial cues in general or to negative facial cues in particular.