Trait Anxiety Is Associated with Negative Interpretations When Resolving Valence Ambiguity of Surprised Faces.

Gewnhi Park,Grace Kim,Dixie D Hu,Michael W Vasey,Julian F Thayer

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01164

Abstract

The current research examines whether trait anxiety is associated with negative interpretation bias when resolving valence ambiguity of surprised faces. To further isolate the neuro-cognitive mechanism, we presented angry, happy, and surprised faces at broad spatial frequency (BSF), high spatial frequency (HSF), and low spatial frequency (LSF) and asked participants to determine the valence of each face. High trait anxiety was associated with more negative interpretations of BSF (i.e., intact) surprised faces. However, the modulation of trait anxiety on the negative interpretation of surprised faces disappeared at HSF and LSF. The current study provides evidence that trait anxiety modulates negative interpretations of BSF surprised faces. However, the negative interpretation of LSF surprised faces appears to be a robust default response that occurs regardless of individual differences in trait anxiety.

Highlights

It has been well documented that people with anxiety tend to interpret ambiguous stimuli negatively—termed a negative interpretation bias (Holmes et al, 2009)
Post hoc comparisons using the Tukey HSD test indicated that low spatial frequency (LSF) (M = −0.29, SD = −2.10) were rated more negatively compared to broad spatial frequency (BSF) (M = −0.21, SD = −1.50) and high spatial frequency (HSF) (M = −0.17, SD = −1.20), but there was no difference between BSF and HSF
We examined whether trait anxiety modulated negative interpretation biases of surprised faces

Summary

Introduction

It has been well documented that people with anxiety tend to interpret ambiguous stimuli negatively—termed a negative interpretation bias (Holmes et al, 2009). A negative interpretation bias has been consistently observed in anxious individuals in response to ambiguous words (Richards and French, 1992), sentences (Eysenck et al, 1991; MacLeod and Cohen, 1993), and scenarios (Hirsch and Mathews, 1997). When an ambiguous sentence (e.g., “The doctor examined little Emma’s growth”) was presented, anxious individuals were more likely to choose a negative interpretation (e.g., “The doctor looked at little Emma’s cancer”) than a neutral interpretation (e.g., “The doctor measured little Emma’s growth”; Eysenck et al, 1991). The anxiety-related negative interpretation bias has been investigated using words, sentences, and paragraphs, but relatively few studies have been conducted using facial expressions (Hallion and Ruscio, 2011). We examined whether the anxietyrelated interpretation bias depends on low level visual processing using different spatial frequency ranges

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