Social anxiety and emotional body perception in context: Behavioral congruence effects with exploratory N170...

Emotional body postures are interpreted in relation to their contexts, but whether social anxiety is associated with altered contextual integration or selective differences across posture valences remains unclear.

Two studies used related posture-context emotion-recognition paradigms. Study 1 examined recognition accuracy and reaction time for positive, neutral, and negative postures presented in positive, neutral, and negative contexts in 69 participants with high or low social anxiety (HSA/LSA). Study 2 explored P1, N170, and late positive potential responses to positive and negative postures presented alone or within positive or negative contexts in an independent EEG sample of 35 participants. Participant-level repeated-measures analyses of variance were conducted.

In Study 1, posture-context congruence improved recognition accuracy and response speed. The overall congruence benefit did not differ significantly between groups, but accuracy showed a Group × Posture Valence × Congruence interaction, indicating that group-dependent congruence patterns varied across posture valences. In Study 2, no reliable ERP congruence effect emerged. However, N170 amplitude during posture-context trials showed a Group × Posture Valence interaction, although multiplicity-adjusted follow-up comparisons did not identify a reliable condition-specific difference.

Posture-context congruence facilitates emotional-body recognition behaviorally. Social anxiety was not associated with a generalized disruption of contextual integration, but the interaction-level findings suggest selective, valence-related group differences. The N170 result offers an exploratory neural complement to this pattern but does not establish a specific perceptual mechanism.