Abstract
People with high trait anxiety demonstrate deteriorated performance in cognitive tests and an attentional bias toward threating stimulus. In addition, the sensitivity of recognizing fearful faces is higher for individuals with high than those with low trait anxiety. The goal of the present study was to examine whether individuals with high trait anxiety would also displayed a higher sensitivity in perceiving other types of facial expressions. The participants’ trait anxiety was assessed using The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory-Trait Scale (N = 100). In Experiment 1, the emotional intensity of four facial expressions (happiness, fear, sadness, anger) was manipulated. The participants had to detect any emotionality of the presented faces. In Experiment 2, by blending two facial expressions with reciprocal proportions using FaceGen Modeller software, three sets of morphing were created: the happy face gradually morphs into one of the negative faces (fear, sadness, or anger), such as a face consisting of 20% happy and 80% fearful expressions. The participants had to discriminate the facial expression as positive or negative. In both experiments, the group with high trait anxiety demonstrated significantly higher sensitivity to facial expressions of sad, angry and fearful faces compared to the group with low trait anxiety. Our results therefore suggest that an individual’ s trait anxiety biases his/her perception of a facial expression appearing to be a negative one in a top-down fashion.
Acknowledgement: MOST 106-2629-H-040-001 107-2410-H-039-002