Extraction of mean emotional tone from face arrays in social anxiety disorder.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is characterized by intense fear when facing a crowd. Processing biases of crowd-related information have been suggested as contributing to the etiology and maintenance of the disorder. Here we tested whether patients with SAD display aberrant patterns of extracting the mean emotional tone from sets of faces.

Methods

Twenty-one participants with SAD and 24 unanxious control participants had to determine the average emotion expression of sets of six different morphed faces ranging from happy to angry. In 20% of trials the six faces were randomly sampled from the entire happy-angry range. The remaining 80% of trials, considered the critical trials, had an emotional outlier: five faces were sampled from one-half of the emotional range, w

SUBMITTER: Bronfman ZZ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5842110 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature