شناسایی احساسات صورت در اضطراب خصلتی

The study investigated the relationship between recognition of emotional facial expressions and trait anxiety. A nonclinical sample of 19 participants with high-trait anxiety was selected, using the trait version of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, and compared with a sample of 20 participants with low-trait anxiety on a facial expression recognition task. Visual stimuli were 42 faces, representing seven emotional expressions: anger, sadness, happiness, fear, surprise, disgust and neutral. Participants had to identify the emotion portrayed by each face. Results showed that participants with high-trait anxiety recognized fear faces significantly better while the two groups did not differ in recognition of other facial expressions.

The aim of the present study is to investigate the relationship between trait anxiety and recognition of emotional facial expressions. Emotion recognition ability is an important component of our nonverbal communication system and an essential skill for successful adaptation and manipulation of the environment. As a fundamental skill for adaptation and successful interpersonal relationships, the emotion recognition ability is nowadays considered to be strictly involved also in different psychopathological disorders. Abnormal recognition of emotional facial expressions is considered a critical factor for poor communication and alterations of adaptive behavior. Early theories, such as Beck's (1976) schema and Bower's (1981) network theory, proposed that, in both anxiety and depression, cognitive biases operate throughout information processing, including perception, attention and memory. Both models assume that the main difference between the two emotions is the content of the bias, with anxious individuals selectively processing threatening information, whereas depressed individuals selectively process information related to sadness, loss and failure. More recent theories suggest that the primary cognitive factor underlying vulnerability to and maintenance of anxiety is the bias in selective attention to threat (Eysenck, 1992 and Mathews, 1990; Williams, Watts, MacLeod, & Mathews, 1997). Following Oatley and Johnson-Laird (1987), who emphasize evolutionary adaptive value of emotions, Mathews (1990) propose that in anxiety the cognitive system is switched into a hypervigilant mode that prioritized the initial automatic encoding of threat. This bias is presumed to operate at a very early stage of attentional processes, which are responsible for initial orienting to and rapid detection of threat in the environment. According to Eysenck (1992) hypervigilance theory, vigilance for threat may also maintain clinical anxiety because anxious individuals are more likely to identify minor threat cues in the environment (Mogg, Millar, & Bradley, 2000). There is widespread evidence of an attentional bias towards threat in clinical and in nonclinical anxiety (Derryberry & Reed, 1997; Mogg et al., 2000). Attentional bias for threat has been found in several studies using the probe classification task on nonclinical samples of high-trait anxiety participants (Bradley, Mogg, Falla, & Hamilton, 1998; Mogg & Bradley, 1999). Data show that high-trait anxious individuals are quicker at responding to probes in the location of threat or angry faces, than neutral or happy faces, in comparison with low-trait anxious individuals. Similar findings have also been found with photographs of fearful, relative to neutral, facial expressions (Fox, 2002). Attentional biases for threat have also been found in various clinical anxiety disorders, including generalized anxiety disorder (Bradley, Mogg, White, Groom, & de Bono, 1999; Mogg, Bradley, & Williams, 1995) and social phobia (Mogg & Bradley, 2002). Attention is involved in emotion recognition but this ability also requires additional knowledge, it thus requires memory of some sort. One of the simplest forms of recognition is in fact called recognition memory and may simply involve the ability to store in memory some information about the early perceptual properties of the visual image, to which another image could be compared subsequently. This form of recognition may be sufficient to discriminate between two faces that are presented at separate points in time whereas recognition of emotions from facial expression requires additional knowledge regarding the contingences between the expression and many other stimuli in the world with which that expression has been directly or indirectly associated (Adolphs, 2002). Although Beck (1976) and Bower (1981) cognitive models predict that in anxiety there will be mood-congruent biases at all stages of emotion processing, including memory, several studies, specifically designed to assess memory biases in anxious participants, have shown incongruent findings (Coles & Heimberg, 2002). Recognition of emotions from facial expressions can be considered distinct from attention and memory but seems to involve both attentional and memory processes. Most studies on emotion recognition have focused principally on depression while few data exist on anxious subjects. Winton, Clark, and Edelmann (1995) found that high social anxiety participants have a bias towards identifying others’ emotional expressions as negative in the absence of an enhanced ability to discriminate among different emotional states in others. Richards et al. (2002) found that high-trait socially anxious participants classified significantly more of the ambiguous faces along the continua surprise-fear-sadness as expressing fear compared to low-trait socially anxious participants. Authors performed additional analysis on emotional expressions that are both frequently confused or not confused with fear to examine whether this bias was likely to reflect a sensitivity effect or simply an effect of response bias. Results show no hint that the high-trait socially anxious participants classified more of the expressions as expressing fear. Following the early findings of selective attention to threat in anxious states and cognitive theories of anxiety, we questioned whether similar content-specific bias may be revealed on recognition of emotion from facial expressions in a sample of high-trait anxious participants using, contrary to Richards et al. (2002), static faces. We have examined in a nonclinical sample with high levels of trait anxiety if there were (1) significant differences in the general emotion recognition ability with regard to participants with low levels of trait anxiety and (2) if there were differences in the recognition of specific emotions. Emotion recognition is in fact a central skill for social competence and abnormalities in this ability can play an important role in the maintenance or etiology of many interpersonal problems characterizing different disorders such as anxiety and depression.