Dynamics of emotional facial expression recognition in individuals with social anxiety

Abstract

This paper demonstrates the utility of ambient-focal attention and pupil dilation dynamics to describe visual processing of emotional facial expressions. Pupil dilation and focal eye movements reflect deeper cognitive processing and thus shed more light on the dynamics of emotional expression recognition. Socially anxious individuals (N = 24) and non-anxious controls (N = 24) were asked to recognize emotional facial expressions that gradually morphed from a neutral expression to one of happiness, sadness, or anger in 10-sec animations. Anxious cohorts exhibited more ambient face scanning than their non-anxious counterparts. We observed a positive relationship between focal fixations and pupil dilation, indicating deeper processing of viewed faces, but only by non-anxious participants, and only during the last phase of emotion recognition. Group differences in the dynamics of ambient-focal attention support the hypothesis of vigilance to emotional expression processing by socially anxious individuals. We discuss the results by referring to current literature on cognitive psychopathology.