William James Center for Research, Department of Education and Psychology, University of Aveiro, Universidade de Aveiro, 3810-193, Aveiro, Portugal.
Department of Education and Psychology, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal.
Sci Rep. 2024 May 13;14(1):10913. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-61682-3.
One of the less recognized effects of anxiety lies in perception alterations caused by how one weighs both sensory evidence and contextual cues. Here, we investigated how anxiety affects our ability to use social cues to anticipate the others' actions. We adapted a paradigm to assess expectations in social scenarios, whereby participants were asked to identify the presence of agents therein, while supported by contextual cues from another agent. Participants (N = 66) underwent this task under safe and threat-of-shock conditions. We extracted both criterion and sensitivity measures as well as gaze data. Our analysis showed that whilst the type of action had the expected effect, threat-of-shock had no effect over criterion and sensitivity. Although showing similar dwell times, gaze exploration of the contextual cue was associated with shorter fixation durations whilst participants were under threat. Our findings suggest that anxiety does not appear to influence the use of expectations in social scenarios.
焦虑的一个不太被人认识到的影响在于感知改变，这是由人们如何权衡感官证据和上下文线索引起的。在这里，我们研究了焦虑如何影响我们利用社会线索来预测他人行为的能力。我们改编了一个范式来评估社交场景中的期望，让参与者在另一个代理的上下文线索的支持下，识别其中的代理存在。参与者（N=66）在安全和受电击威胁的条件下完成了这项任务。我们提取了判断标准和敏感性指标以及注视数据。我们的分析表明，虽然动作类型有预期的效果，但威胁对判断标准和敏感性没有影响。尽管注视时间相似，但当参与者处于威胁之下时，对上下文线索的注视探索与较短的注视持续时间相关。我们的研究结果表明，焦虑似乎不会影响在社交场景中使用期望。
