As mean and numerosity are mathematically related to each other (i.e., the mean is the sum of all element values divided by the numerosity), it is essential to measure the numerosity perception of emotional faces for a better understanding of social information processing among individuals with high social anxiety. Participants with social anxiety rated the average face at a higher negative emotional magnitude than did control participants.Īnother essential aspect of visual information processing of a group of stimuli is the numerosity perception 15, which refers to the ability to estimate the quantity of objects. In these studies, participants were asked to identify the emotional category that the average face belonged to or rate the average emotional magnitude 13, 14.
Despite the significance of processing ensemble information, only a few studies have investigated the perception of a crowd of facial expressions among individuals with high social anxiety. Thus, studying the emotional perception of a group of faces would allow us to understand important characteristics of social information processing in social anxiety. Furthermore, individuals with high social anxiety tend to evaluate the overall emotion of faces in the crowd more negatively than that of a single face 12. People often interact with more than one person on an everyday basis, and individuals experiencing social anxiety frequently report feeling anxious while interacting with a large group of people (e.g., presenting in front of a large audience) 11. In previous studies wherein participants were presented with a picture of an emotional face and asked to identify its emotional category or rate its emotional magnitude, people with high social anxiety perceived neutral or ambiguous facial expressions more negatively than those in the control group 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Since evaluations from others are often conveyed through and inferred from facial expressions, how individuals with social anxiety respond to others’ faces could provide insight into social information processing among these individuals. Interpretational bias has also been studied using pictures of emotional faces. In these studies, individuals with social anxiety tended to interpret social situations more negatively than those in the control group. Interpretational bias among people with social anxiety has been studied by examining how participants interpret a scenario about an ambiguous social situation 4, 5. The cognitive model of social anxiety suggests that social anxiety develops and is maintained by negative biases in social information processing 2, 3: individuals with high social anxiety have a bias-in selective attention, memory, and interpretation-toward negative stimuli or events. Social anxiety is the fear of being negatively evaluated by others in social settings 1. Thus, our results suggest that socially anxious individuals lack the bias toward positive emotion and are more sensitive to negative emotion than nonanxious individuals in perceiving the numerosity of facial expressions. Correlation analyses indicated that social anxiety was negatively associated with the parameters of the function (mean for bias and standard deviation for sensitivity r = − 0.34, p = 0.003 for mean r = − 0.23, p = 0.047 for standard deviation). Individuals with low social anxiety showed a bias toward positive faces ( t(17) = 2.44, p = 0.026), while those with high social anxiety did not ( t(17) = 1.87, p = 0.079). Bias and sensitivity in numerosity perception of emotions were estimated by fitting a psychometric function to participants’ responses.
They were asked to judge which emotion-positive or negative-was more numerous in the crowd.
#PSYCHOPY MANUAL TRIAL#
In each trial of the experiment, participants were presented with a group of 16 emotional faces, varying in the number of faces expressing positive and negative emotions. Seventy-five college students completed self-reported questionnaires-assessing social anxiety symptoms-and a numerosity comparison experiment. This study investigated the numerosity perception of emotional faces among individuals with high social anxiety. The cognitive model of social anxiety suggests an association between social anxiety and cognitive bias toward negative social information.
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