To be or Not to be Threatening, but What was the Question? Biased Face Evaluation in Social Anxiety and Depression Depends on How You Frame the Query.

Wolf-Gero Lange,Mike Rinck,Eni S Becker

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00205

Abstract

Scientific evidence is equivocal on whether Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is characterized by a biased negative evaluation of facial expressions, even though it is assumed that such a bias plays a crucial role in the maintenance of the disorder. The way of framing the evaluation question may play an important role in the inconsistencies of earlier results. To investigate this issue, an unselected sample of 95 participants (11 males) with varying degrees of social anxiety and depressive symptoms rated facial crowds with different ratios of neutral-disgust, neutral-sad, neutral-happy, and neutral-surprised expressions in terms of friendliness, approval, difficulty to make contact, and threat. It appeared that the impact of social anxiety on ratings was highly dependent on the type of question that was asked, but not on the type of emotion that was shown: a high degree of social anxiety was related to a more positive evaluation of crowds when friendliness was assessed. When asking about the difficulty to make contact, social anxiety was related to more difficulty. When the threat evoked by a crowd had to be evaluated, higher degrees of social anxiety were tendentiously correlated with higher threat ratings. Degree of depression, on the other hand, was negatively correlated only to approval ratings. In addition, with an increasing degree of depression, the negative impact that any additional emotional face had on approval ratings increased as well. The theoretical and methodological implications of the results are discussed.

Highlights

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is a common, debilitating condition that is characterized by an excessive fear of scrutiny or negative evaluation by others (American Psychiatric Association, 2000)
The present study examined whether social anxiety is associated with biases in the explicit evaluation of a variety of facial crowds
In sum, it can be concluded that the degree of social anxiety is related to biased evaluation of facial crowds, irrespective of the depicted emotion, once the framing of the evaluation question is taken into account: high scores of social anxiety (a) correlated with high friendliness ratings, (b) seemed to be related to higher emotional cost ratings, and (c) were tendentiously correlated with higher threat ratings

Summary

Introduction

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is a common, debilitating condition that is characterized by an excessive fear of scrutiny or negative evaluation by others (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). It is assumed that cognitive biases such as “attentional biases” are fueled by an overactive “threat evaluation system” that generally tags fear-relevant cues in the environment as mostly threatening rather than nonthreatening (Mogg and Bradley, 1998). Keeping this mechanism in mind, it is most surprising, that such a threat evaluation influences automatic attentional processes and behavioral avoidance impulses with respect to faces (Heuer et al, 2007; Lange et al, 2008; Roelofs et al, 2010), but not explicit evaluations of the very same stimuli (Staugaard, 2010)

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