Wo Jackie Wai Yi, Liao Weiyan, Hsiao Janet Hui-Wen
Department of Psychology, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China.
Division of Social Science, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong SAR, China.
Cogn Res Princ Implic. 2025 Jun 2;10(1):25. doi: 10.1186/s41235-025-00635-4.
Previous studies suggested that social anxiety is associated with interpretation bias, theory of mind deficit, and eye gaze avoidance when identifying facial emotions. We tested the hypothesis that socially anxious individuals would be more affected by mask use during facial emotion recognition. 88 healthy undergraduates with various levels of social anxiety were invited. Participants judged the emotions of masked and unmasked facial expressions. Eye Movement Analysis with Hidden Markov Models was used to analyze participants' eye movement patterns during the task. Potential confounders including gender, depressive symptoms, stress, and executive planning ability were controlled for in the analyses. Results failed to support our hypothesis. Instead, higher social anxiety was associated with higher accuracy rates for angry and fearful faces and lower false alarm rates for sad faces. Eye movement patterns were similar across social anxiety levels. Interestingly, an exploratory moderation analysis revealed that an increase in using a more eye-centered strategy due to mask use was significantly associated with a larger drop in accuracy rate for fearful faces among individuals with higher social anxiety, while non-significantly associated with a smaller drop among individuals with lower social anxiety. Thus, our study indicates social anxiety, at least at subclinical levels, may be associated with a generally heightened sensitivity to negative emotions. However, such heightened sensitivity diminishes if they switch to a more eye-centered strategy when viewing masked facial emotions. Potential mechanisms and implications were discussed.
先前的研究表明，社交焦虑与面部情绪识别中的解释偏差、心理理论缺陷以及目光回避有关。我们检验了这样一个假设，即社交焦虑个体在面部情绪识别过程中会更容易受到戴口罩的影响。我们邀请了88名具有不同社交焦虑水平的健康本科生。参与者对戴口罩和未戴口罩的面部表情的情绪进行判断。使用隐马尔可夫模型的眼动分析来分析参与者在任务过程中的眼动模式。在分析中控制了包括性别、抑郁症状、压力和执行计划能力等潜在混杂因素。结果未能支持我们的假设。相反，社交焦虑程度越高，识别愤怒和恐惧面孔的准确率越高，识别悲伤面孔的误报率越低。不同社交焦虑水平的眼动模式相似。有趣的是，一项探索性调节分析显示，由于戴口罩而增加使用以眼睛为中心的策略，与社交焦虑程度较高的个体识别恐惧面孔的准确率大幅下降显著相关，而与社交焦虑程度较低的个体识别恐惧面孔的准确率小幅下降无显著相关。因此，我们的研究表明，社交焦虑，至少在亚临床水平，可能与对负面情绪普遍更高的敏感性有关。然而，当他们在观察戴口罩的面部情绪时切换到以眼睛为中心的策略时，这种更高的敏感性就会降低。我们讨论了潜在的机制和意义。
