| Abstract: |
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 |