Processing emotional expressions under fear of rejection: Findings from diffusion model analyses

In the mood-of-the-crowd task, participants have to classify crowds of emotional faces according to the predominant emotions. We examined 2 possible moderators of a previously found positivity bias in this task: fear of rejection and threat of social exclusion. Participants (Study 1: N = 84, Study 2: N = 126) received bogus feedback on their future social relationships that was either negative (frustration group) or positive (satisfaction group). By means of diffusion model analyses (Ratcliff, 1978), we examined the cognitive processes involved in the task. Our main findings are that more fearful individuals accumulated negative facial information more quickly than their less fearful counterparts (drift rate of the diffusion model; dynamic bias). Furthermore, individuals with a lower fear of rejection who were frustrated showed a prior bias (i.e., shifted starting point of the diffusion model) for positive rather than negative faces in contrast to the more fearful individuals. This suggests that the less fearful individuals tried to restore the thwarted motive by shifting a criterion, so that ambiguous situations are perceived more positively. The present studies demonstrate that diffusion modeling supplies important information about underlying cognitive processes in the domain of the affiliation motive. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).