Relationships between anxiety sensitivity, hyperventilation, and emotional reactivity to displays of facial emotions

Undergraduate women who scored in the top (n = 24) and bottom 15% (n = 24) on the Anxiety Sensitivity Index viewed randomly counterbalanced sets of three neutral and three dysphoric faces after having either hyperventilated or relaxed. Participants rated the amount of change they experienced in Happiness, Sadness, Fear, Anger, Surprise, Disgust, and Contempt after viewing each face. High Anxiety Sensitive (AS) women reported significantly greater changes on six of the seven emotions, even though pretreatment differences in somatically experienced anxiety were covaried out. Significant three-way interactions were found for participants self-rated changes in Fear and Surprise, with tendencies toward significance (p < .10) also emerging for Anger and Disgust. The pattern of interactions was identical for all four variables. Low AS women manifested greater reductions in these four emotions when viewing neutral as opposed to dysphoric faces, regardless of whether they hyperventilated or relaxed. High AS women who relaxed manifested similar discriminative abilities. High AS women who hyperventilated, however, reported no relative changes in emotional arousal to both dysphoric and neutral faces. The blunted discrimination shown by high AS women who hyperventilated suggests that, when these individuals are in a physiologically challenged state, they may be less responsive to "early warning" indicators of social distress displayed by others which may, in turn, cause them to experience subsequent interpersonal difficulties.