Perceiving the Self and Emotions with an Anxious Mind: Evidence from an Implicit Perceptual Task

Michella Feldborg, Naomi A. Lee, Kalai Hung, Kaiping Peng and Jie Sui
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Michella Feldborg: School of Psychology, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen AB24 3FX, UK
Naomi A. Lee: School of Psychology, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen AB24 3FX, UK
Kalai Hung: Department of Psychology, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
Kaiping Peng: Department of Psychology, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
Jie Sui: School of Psychology, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen AB24 3FX, UK

IJERPH, 2021, vol. 18, issue 22, 1-14

Abstract: Anxiety disorders cause mental distress and low wellbeing in many people worldwide. Theories of anxiety describe negative worldviews and self-views as maintaining factors of the disorders. Recent research in social cognition has found a link between depression and altered perceptual biases to emotions, but the same research on anxiety is still missing. In this study, we measured perceptual biases to emotional and self-related stimuli in sub-clinically anxious participants and healthy controls using a self-emotional shape-label matching task. Results demonstrate that anxious participants had a diminished perceptual self-bias compared with healthy controls. Furthermore, the severity of anxiety was related to an emotional bias towards valanced other-related stimuli. The findings confirm the hypothesis that anxious individuals display an altered self-prioritisation effect in comparison with healthy individuals and that anxiety severity is linked to altered responses to emotionally valanced others. These findings have potential implications for early diagnosis and treatment of anxiety disorders.

Keywords: anxiety; mental health; self-prioritisation effect; positivity bias (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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