首页 | 本学科首页   官方微博 | 高级检索  
     


The relationship between social anxiety and the perception of depth-ambiguous biological motion stimuli is mediated by inhibitory ability
Authors:Adam Heenan  Nikolaus F. Troje
Affiliation:1. Queen''s University, Department of Psychology, Kingston, ON K7L3N6, Canada;2. Queen''s University, School of Computing, Kingston, ON K7L3N6, Canada;3. Queen''s University, Department of Biology, Kingston, ON K7L3N6, Canada
Abstract:Orthographically projected biological motion stimuli are depth-ambiguous. Consequently, their projection when oriented towards the viewer is the same as when oriented away. Despite this, observers tend to interpret such stimuli as facing the viewer more often. Some have speculated that this facing-the-viewer bias may exist for sociobiological reasons: Mistaking another human as retreating when they are actually approaching could have more severe consequences than the opposite error. An implication of this theory is that the facing-towards percept may be perceived as more threatening than the facing-away percept. Given this, as well as the finding that anxious individuals have been found to display an attentional bias towards threatening stimuli, we reasoned that more anxious individuals might have stronger facing-the-viewer biases. Furthermore, since anxious individuals have been found to perform poorer on inhibition tasks, we hypothesized that inhibitory ability would mediate the relationship between anxiety and the facing-the-viewer bias (i.e., difficulty inhibiting the threatening percept). Exploring individual differences, we asked participants to complete anxiety questionnaires, to perform a Go/No-Go task, and then to complete a perceptual task that allowed us to assess their facing-the-viewer biases. As hypothesized, we found that both greater anxiety and weaker inhibitory ability were associated with greater facing-the-viewer biases. In addition, we found that inhibitory ability significantly mediated the relationship between anxiety and facing-the-viewer biases. Our results provide further support that the facing-the-viewer bias is sensitive to the sociobiological relevance of biological motion stimuli, and that the threat bias for ambiguous visual stimuli is mediated by inhibitory ability.
Keywords:2323 (Visual Perception)   2346 (Attention)   2340 (Cognitive Processes)   3040 (Social Perception and Cognition)   3215 (Neuroses and Anxiety Disorders)
本文献已被 ScienceDirect 等数据库收录!
设为首页 | 免责声明 | 关于勤云 | 加入收藏

Copyright©北京勤云科技发展有限公司  京ICP备09084417号