Induced Anxiety Influences The Perception Of Negative Facial Expressions In Single Faces And Face Ensembles

The visual system enables us to quickly recognize different facial expressions despite the high complexity of human faces. This impressive ability to perceive emotions can be biased by social anxiety, which might lead to an overestimation of social threats from individuals. However, it is still under consideration how state anxiety influences our ability to process and summarize information from a group as an ensemble. The current study aims to examine whether state anxiety impairs our ability to assess the mean emotional expression of multiple faces by intensity overestimation of decreased accuracy. The experiment included two sessions, the first one involved no anxiety induction procedure, while the second session included anxiety induction. In both sessions, participants performed an adjustment task estimating the average emotion intensity for either single face or face ensemble condition. The final sample consisted of 46 individuals (mean age: 21±2.97) who successfully exhibited induced anxiety. The results indicated that anxious perceivers overestimated the average emotional intensity not only in the single face condition but also in the ensemble condition. Furthermore, we have shown that the emotion amplification stemmed from a systematic bias of the average emotion intensity, rather than from impaired accuracy. Our results demonstrate that state anxiety is likely to navigate attention to the faces with the most intensive facial expressions and, subsequently, bias their average impression. Exploring the effects of anxiety on ensemble perception is essential for further revealing the complexities of social cognition and how emotional biases can alter group-level information processing