Social anxiety biases the evaluation of facial displays: Evidence from single face and multi-facial stimuli |
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| Authors: | Céline Douilliez Vincent Yzerbyt Eva Gilboa-Schechtman Pierre Philippot |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Univ Lille Nord de France , Lille , France;2. UDL3, PSITEC , Villeneuve d'Ascq , France celine.douilliez@univ-lille3.fr;4. Department of Psychology , Université catholique de Louvain , Louvain-la-Neuve , Belgium;5. Department of Psychology and Gonda Brain Research Center , Bar-Ilan University , Ramat-Gan , Israel |
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| Abstract: | This study examined the contribution of social anxiety to the evaluation of emotional facial stimuli, while controlling for the gender of participants and stimuli. Participants (n=63) completed two tasks: a single face evaluation task in which they had to evaluate angry versus neutral faces and, a facial crowd evaluation task in which they had to evaluate displays with a varying number of neutral and angry faces. In each task, participants had to evaluate the stimuli with respect to (a) the degree of disapproval expressed by the single face/crowd, and (b) the perceived difficulty of interacting with the face/crowd (emotional cost). Consistent with earlier studies, results showed that social anxiety modulated the evaluation of single faces for emotional cost, but not for disapproval ratings. In contrast, the evaluation of facial crowds was modulated by social anxiety on both ratings. |
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| Keywords: | Social anxiety Emotional facial expression Interpretation bias Evaluation bias |
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