Interpretation of facial expressions and social anxiety: Specificity and source of biases

Cognitive-behavioural models of social phobia (Clark & Wells, 1995; Rapee & Heimberg, 1997) propose that biased information processing contributes to the maintenance of social phobia. Given the importance of facial expressions in social interactions, recent investigations of these information-processing biases have increasingly used facial stimuli. The current study utilised schematic faces of emotional expressions to investigate interpretations of facial expressions and specific facial features in individuals with high and low social anxiety. Individuals with elevated social anxiety demonstrated biases in their perceptions of negative valence from the faces, whereas group differences were not observed for perceptions of activity or potency. Further, although the two groups generally utilised the same facial features to interpret facial expressions, the results suggested that individuals with high social anxiety may be more lenient in perceiving threat in faces than individuals without social anxiety.