Individual Differences in the Ability to Recognise Facial Identity Are Associated with Social Anxiety

Joshua M Davis,Romina Palermo,Hugh Dennett,Richard O'Kearney,Elinor Mckone,Kirsty B O'Connor,Bernhard T Baune

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0028800

Joshua M Davis, Romina Palermo + Show 5 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0028800

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Abstract

Previous research has been concerned with the relationship between social anxiety and the recognition of face expression but the question of whether there is a relationship between social anxiety and the recognition of face identity has been neglected. Here, we report the first evidence that social anxiety is associated with recognition of face identity, across the population range of individual differences in recognition abilities. Results showed poorer face identity recognition (on the Cambridge Face Memory Test) was correlated with a small but significant increase in social anxiety (Social Interaction Anxiety Scale) but not general anxiety (State-Trait Anxiety Inventory). The correlation was also independent of general visual memory (Cambridge Car Memory Test) and IQ. Theoretically, the correlation could arise because correct identification of people, typically achieved via faces, is important for successful social interactions, extending evidence that individuals with clinical-level deficits in face identity recognition (prosopagnosia) often report social stress due to their inability to recognise others. Equally, the relationship could arise if social anxiety causes reduced exposure or attention to people's faces, and thus to poor development of face recognition mechanisms.

Highlights

Social anxiety is characterized by an intense concern about the impression one makes on others and represents anxiety situationally bound to social contexts [1,2]
It is well established that social anxiety affects facial expression processing with an initial hypervigilance for threat followed by avoidance [7]
Note these correlations were non-significant, and numerically extremely small. This was despite the moderate, significant correlation between the two anxiety measures themselves (SIAS with State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI)-T, tau b (tB) = .539, p,.001; r = .710, p,.001, n = 78). Given that it was previously found [24] that the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI-T) correlated with face-plus-hair-and-clothing recognition only in females, we examined the correlations for each sex independently

Summary

Introduction

Social anxiety is characterized by an intense concern about the impression one makes on others and represents anxiety situationally bound to social contexts [1,2]. While there are clinical forms of social anxiety (social anxiety disorder, social phobia [3]), social anxiety is present, and varies in the healthy adult population. Patients with social phobia are faster at detecting angry than happy faces in visual search tasks [8] and have a bias to recognise faces with negative expressions [9] and those that they had previously categorized as critical rather than accepting [10]. People with high, but not clinical, levels of social anxiety do not appear to remember threatening faces more than those with low social anxiety [6]

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