University of Bristol, UK.
Psychol Sci. 2013 Aug;24(8):1591-4. doi: 10.1177/0956797612474021. Epub 2013 Jun 18.
We investigated whether acutely induced anxiety modifies the ability to match photographed faces. Establishing the extent to which anxiety affects face-matching accuracy is important because of the relevance of face-matching performance to critical security-related applications. Participants (N = 28) completed the Glasgow Face Matching Test twice, once during a 20-min inhalation of medical air and once during a similar inhalation of air enriched with 7.5% CO2, which is a validated method for inducing acute anxiety. Anxiety degraded performance, but only with respect to hits, not false alarms. This finding provides further support for the dissociation between the ability to accurately identify a genuine match between faces and the ability to identify the lack of a match. Problems with the accuracy of facial identification are not resolved even when viewers are presented with a good photographic image of a face, and identification inaccuracy may be heightened when viewers are experiencing acute anxiety.
我们研究了急性焦虑是否会改变匹配照片中人脸的能力。确定焦虑在多大程度上影响面孔匹配准确性非常重要，因为面孔匹配表现与关键的安全相关应用有关。参与者（N=28）两次完成格拉斯哥面孔匹配测试，一次是在吸入 20 分钟医用空气期间，一次是在吸入 7.5%CO2 空气期间，这是一种已验证的急性焦虑诱发方法。焦虑降低了表现，但仅针对击中，而不是误报。这一发现为面孔之间准确识别真实匹配的能力与识别缺乏匹配的能力之间的分离提供了进一步的支持。即使向观察者呈现了一张好的人脸照片，也无法解决人脸识别的准确性问题，并且当观察者经历急性焦虑时，识别不准确的可能性会增加。
