Prioritization of danger-related social signals during threat-induced anxiety

Under threat, the combinations of fearful display and gaze orientation emitted by others can provide crucial information about the presence and location of the danger, as well as whether other individuals are in distress and need help. While it has been shown that threat-induced anxiety facilitates the processing of fearful faces, the question remains as to whether the processing of one of the two combinations of fearful displays and gaze direction (signaling danger vs. need for help) is prioritized within a threatening environment. To address this question, we ran two experiments. In a first online experiment, we showed that fearful displays associated with averted and direct gaze are appraised as preferentially signaling danger and need for help, respectively. In a second experiment, participants performed a fear categorization task (neutral vs. fear faces), manipulating gaze direction and intensity levels of facial expressions, under two alternating contexts: one involving exposure to unpredictable distress screams (threat condition) and the other being a nonthreat control condition. In threat blocks, participants had a higher tendency to interpret averted faces as expressing fear. Drift-diffusion analyses revealed that this resulted from the combined increase in drift rate and threshold. Our findings showed that threat-induced anxiety leads to prioritized processing of averted over direct fearful facial displays, assigning processing priority to social signals that convey information about the presence and location of potential danger. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).