Anxiety-Related Bias in the Classification of Emotionally Ambiguous Facial Expressions

Richards, Anne
French, Christopher C.
Calder, Andrew J.
Webb, Ben
Fox, Rachel
Young, Andrew W.

¹School of Psychology, Birkbeck College, University of London, Bloomsbury, London, England
²Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths College, University of London, London, England
³MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, England
⁴Department of Psychology, University of York, York, England.

⁵Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Anne Richards, School of Psychology, Birkbeck College, University of London, Malet Street, Bloomsbury, London WC1E 7HX, England.

Rachel Fox is now at the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, University College London, London, England.

Received Date: December 17, 2001; Revised Date: March 13, 2002; Accepted Date: May 3, 2002

Emotion 2(3):p 273-287, September 2002.

High- and low-trait socially anxious individuals classified the emotional expressions of photographic quality continua of interpolated (“morphed”) facial images that were derived from combining 6 basic prototype emotional expressions to various degrees, with the 2 adjacent emotions arranged in an emotion hexagon. When fear was 1 of the 2 component emotions, the high-trait group displayed enhanced sensitivity for fear. In a 2nd experiment where a mood manipulation was incorporated, again, the high-trait group exhibited enhanced sensitivity for fear. The low-trait group was sensitive for happiness in the control condition. The mood-manipulated group had increased sensitivity for anger expressions, and trait anxiety did not moderate these effects. Interpretations of the results related to the classification of fearful expressions are discussed.