Task framing reduces emotion decoding negativity biases in social anxiety

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Social anxiety is associated with difficulty in decoding emotional expressions. In this work, we present two experiments demonstrating that manipulating the apparent social relevance of an emotion-identification task can reduce these difficulties. In Experiment 1, we find that social anxiety predicts an oversensitivity to anger expressions when participants are told they are completing a task that measures social skills. However, when the same task is framed as a measure of intellectual skills, this oversensitivity to anger is eliminated. Experiment 2 finds that social anxiety interferes with participants' ability to discriminate real from fake smiles when participants are told they are completing a test of social skills, but not when they are completing an ostensible measure of intellectual skills.