Bias and sensitivity in numerosity perception of negative emotions among individuals with high social anxiety

Abstract

The cognitive model of social anxiety suggests an association between social anxiety and cognitive bias toward negative social information. This study investigated the numerosity perception of emotional faces among individuals with high social anxiety. Seventy-five college students completed self-reported questionnaires—assessing social anxiety symptoms—and a numerosity comparison experiment. In each trial of the experiment, participants were presented with a group of 16 emotional faces, varying in the number of faces expressing positive and negative emotions. They were asked to judge which emotion—positive or negative—was more numerous in the crowd. Bias and sensitivity in numerosity perception of emotions were estimated by fitting a psychometric function to participants’ responses. Individuals with low social anxiety showed a bias toward positive faces (t(17) = 2.44, p = 0.026), while those with high social anxiety did not (t(17) = 1.87, p = 0.079). Correlation analyses indicated that social anxiety was negatively associated with the parameters of the function (mean for bias and standard deviation for sensitivity; r = − 0.34, p = 0.003 for mean; r = − 0.23, p = 0.047 for standard deviation). Thus, our results suggest that socially anxious individuals lack the bias toward positive emotion and are more sensitive to negative emotion than nonanxious individuals in perceiving the numerosity of facial expressions.