Communication of fear: Facial emotion recognition varies with individual and environmental changes

Facial expression recognition is central to social communication and dependent on environmental conditions. For example, in a dangerous situation, we tend to identify threat better than safety information. Such recognition biases in favour of threat detection can prevent harm and injury but, if exaggerated, also contribute to the development and maintenance of anxious psychopathology. We will examine interindividual differences in threat perception and its malleability through threat-safety reversal learning using whole-head magnetoencephalography. This will involve an emotion recognition test with subtle expressions of fearful or happy faces in contextual settings of threat-of-shock or safety. Previous findings show early neural priming of context-congruent face processing (i.e., fearful faces during threat). Based on this, we predict this threat-selective bias is pronounced in individuals prone to anxious psychopathology who benefit less from threat reversal to safety. The results will improve our understanding of perceptual biases from healthy functional to the anxiety disorder spectrum.