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Abstract
High trait anxiety has been associated with detriments in emotional face processing. By contrast, relatively little is known about the effects of state anxiety on emotional face processing. We investigated the effects of state anxiety on recognition of emotional expressions (anger, sadness, surprise, disgust, fear and happiness) experimentally, using the 7.5% carbon dioxide (CO2) model to induce state anxiety, and in a large observational study. The experimental studies indicated reduced global (rather than emotion-specific) emotion recognition accuracy and increased interpretation bias (a tendency to perceive anger over happiness) when state anxiety was heightened. The observational study confirmed that higher state anxiety is associated with poorer emotion recognition, and indicated that negative effects of trait anxiety are negated when controlling for state anxiety, suggesting a mediating effect of state anxiety. These findings may have implications for anxiety disorders, which are characterized by increased frequency, intensity or duration of state anxious episodes.
Highlights
Emotional face processing is one of a number of fundamental non-verbal components of social interaction [1,2]
The data that form the basis of the results presented here are available from the University of Bristol Research Data Repository
We did not include a negative control task in our experimental studies, again due to time constraints during the inhalation procedure, so we cannot rule out the possibility that the effect of state anxiety on emotion recognition sensitivity is due to a global performance deficit. The findings from these studies suggest that state anxiety causes a global decrease in emotion recognition and a bias towards identifying anger in ambiguous facial expressions
Summary
Emotional face processing is one of a number of fundamental non-verbal components of social interaction [1,2]. Emotional expressions are a rich source of information that enables the viewer to infer the thoughts, emotional state and intention of others, and they can influence behavioural tendencies to approach or avoid others [3,4]. Aberrant emotional face processing has been reported in a number of psychiatric disorders and among individuals with antisocial tendencies [5,6,7,8,9].
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