Induced Anxiety Influences The Perception Of Negative Facial Expressions In Single Faces And Face Ensembles
Dmitry Koch (),
Evgenia Fedorova () and
Dmitry Lyusin ()
Additional contact information
Dmitry Koch: National Research University Higher School of Economics
Evgenia Fedorova: National Research University Higher School of Economics
Dmitry Lyusin: National Research University Higher School of Economics
HSE Working papers from National Research University Higher School of Economics
Abstract:
The visual system enables us to quickly recognize different facial expressions despite the high complexity of human faces. This impressive ability to perceive emotions can be biased by social anxiety, which might lead to an overestimation of social threats from individuals. However, it is still under consideration how state anxiety influences our ability to process and summarize information from a group as an ensemble. The current study aims to examine whether state anxiety impairs our ability to assess the mean emotional expression of multiple faces by intensity overestimation of decreased accuracy. The experiment included two sessions, the first one involved no anxiety induction procedure, while the second session included anxiety induction. In both sessions, participants performed an adjustment task estimating the average emotion intensity for either single face or face ensemble condition. The final sample consisted of 46 individuals (mean age: 21±2.97) who successfully exhibited induced anxiety. The results indicated that anxious perceivers overestimated the average emotional intensity not only in the single face condition but also in the ensemble condition. Furthermore, we have shown that the emotion amplification stemmed from a systematic bias of the average emotion intensity, rather than from impaired accuracy. Our results demonstrate that state anxiety is likely to navigate attention to the faces with the most intensive facial expressions and, subsequently, bias their average impression. Exploring the effects of anxiety on ensemble perception is essential for further revealing the complexities of social cognition and how emotional biases can alter group-level information processing
Keywords: ensemble coding; anxiety; summary statistics; emotion; social cognition. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Z (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23 pages
Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe and nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Published in WP BRP Series: Psychology / PSY, November 2024, pages 1-23
Downloads: (external link)
https://wp.hse.ru/data/2024/11/17/1934223052/140PSY2024.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hig:wpaper:140psy2024
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in HSE Working papers from National Research University Higher School of Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Shamil Abdulaev () and Shamil Abdulaev ().