Investigating the role of mood induction on emotional facial recognition in social anxiety

Individuals with high trait social anxiety (SA) experience multiple challenges when interacting with others. Social skills abilities like accurate emotional facial expression recognition are particularly impaired in this population. Ambiguous and angry facial expressions are most often miscategorized and met with uncertainty. Part of this confusion may be attributable to increased state anxiety when approaching social situations. However, little is known about the influencing role of state anxiety on emotional facial expression recognition among those with social anxiety. The present study aimed to evaluate the impact of state anxiety on emotional facial recognition. Sixty-eight undergraduate students with high trait social anxiety participated in a pre-post emotional facial recognition task. Participants were presented with happy, neutral, and angry facial expressions in random order and asked to categorize the expressed emotion among six basic emotion categories. In between emotional facial recognition tasks, participants engaged in a mood induction procedure (i.e., mock discussion with a confederate) aimed to increase state anxiety. The results suggest that individuals with high-trait SA were significantly worse at recognizing happy facial expressions post-affect induction. Furthermore, individuals with high-trait SA showed significant difficulty in accurately recognizing neutral facial expressions across pre- and post-conditions. An error rate analysis revealed that neutral and happy facial expressions were most often miscategorized as either surprise, angry, sad, or disgust. This study highlights that positively-valenced expressions are met with increased uncertainty particularly when experiencing elevations in state anxiety.