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Published on: July 19, 2017
Social anxiety modulates subliminal affective priming.
Elizabeth S Paul1, Stuart A J Pope, John G Fennell
1Centre for Behavioural Biology, School of Veterinary Science, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom. e.paul@bristol.ac.uk
Plos One
|May 23, 2012
Summary
Trait social anxiety influences early affective responses to visual stimuli. Individuals with higher social anxiety showed stronger positive responses to smiling faces, suggesting altered pre-attentive processing.
Area of Science:
- Psychology
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Social Psychology
Background:
- Anxiety is linked to variations in early visual processing, often increasing threat attention.
- Previous research has not determined if early affective responses to images vary with anxiety levels.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if trait social anxiety correlates with differing affective responses to subliminally presented emotional faces.
Main Methods:
- A subliminal affective priming task was used with 67 participants.
- Briefly presented faces (smiling, neutral, angry) were followed by Chinese character masks.
- Participants rated their liking of the characters to gauge affective response to the unseen faces.
Main Results:
- Face images significantly influenced character liking (p<0.05).
- Smiling faces elicited more positive ratings than neutral or angry faces.
- Higher social anxiety positively correlated with liking of smiling-relative-to-neutral-primed characters (r = .323, p<0.01).
Conclusions:
- Trait social anxiety is associated with varied affective responding at the pre-attentive visual processing stage.
- Priming effects were observed for smiling but not angry faces.
- Pre-attentive processes for affective priming may differ from those driving attentional biases in anxiety.
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