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We investigated the time course of selective attention to face regions during judgment of dis/approval by low (LSA) and high (HSA) social anxiety undergraduates (with clinical levels on questionnaire measures). The viewers' gaze direction was assessed and the stimulus visual saliency of face regions was computed, for video-clips displaying dynamic facial expressions. Social anxiety was related to perception of disapproval from faces with an ambiguous smile (i.e. with non-happy eyes), but not those with congruent happy eyes and a smile. HSA observers selectively looked earlier at the eye region, whereas LSA ones preferentially looked at the smiling mouth. Consistently, gaze allocation was less related to visual saliency of the smile for HSA than for LSA viewers. The attentional bias towards the less salient eye region – thus opposing the automatic capture by the smile – suggests that it is strategically driven in HSA individuals, possibly aimed at detecting negative evaluators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research has found a relationship between perceived facial attractiveness and perceived personal trustworthiness. We examined the time course of attractiveness relative to trustworthiness evaluation of emotional and neutral faces. This served to explore whether attractiveness might be used as an easily accessible cue and a quick shortcut for judging trustworthiness. Detection thresholds and judgment latencies as a function of expressive intensity were measured. Significant correlations between attractiveness and trustworthiness consistently held for six emotional expressions at four intensities, and neutral faces. Importantly, perceived attractiveness preceded perceived trustworthiness, with lower detection thresholds and shorter decision latencies. This reveals a time course advantage for attractiveness, and suggests that earlier attractiveness impressions could bias trustworthiness inferences. A heuristic cognitive mechanism is hypothesised to ease processing demands by relying on simple and observable clues (attractiveness) as a substitute for more complex and not easily accessible information (trustworthiness). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Facial expressions of emotion involve a physical component of morphological changes in a face and an affective component conveying information about the expresser’s internal feelings. It remains unresolved how much recognition and discrimination of expressions rely on the perception of morphological patterns or the processing of affective content. This review of research on the role of visual and emotional factors in expression recognition reached three major conclusions. First, behavioral, neurophysiological, and computational measures indicate that basic expressions are reliably recognized and discriminated from one another, albeit the effect may be inflated by the use of prototypical expression stimuli and forced-choice responses. Second, affective content along the dimensions of valence and arousal is extracted early from facial expressions, although this coarse affective representation contributes minimally to categorical recognition of specific expressions. Third, the physical configuration and visual saliency of facial features contribute significantly to expression recognition, with “emotionless” computational models being able to reproduce some of the basic phenomena demonstrated in human observers. We conclude that facial expression recognition, as it has been investigated in conventional laboratory tasks, depends to a greater extent on perceptual than affective information and mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pairs of emotional (pleasant or unpleasant) and neutral scenes were presented peripherally (≥5° away from fixation) during a central letter-discrimination task. Selective attentional capture was assessed by means of eye movement orienting, i.e., probability of first fixating a scene and the time until first fixation. Static and dynamic visual saliency values of the scenes were computationally modelled. Results revealed selective orienting to both pleasant and unpleasant relative to neutral scenes. Importantly, such effects remained in the absence of visual saliency differences, even though saliency influenced eye movements. This suggests that selective attention to emotional scenes is genuinely driven by the processing of affective significance in extrafoveal vision. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Genuine smiles convey enjoyment or positive affect, whereas fake smiles conceal or leak negative feelings or motives (e.g. arrogance, contempt, embarrassment), or merely show affiliation or politeness. We investigated the minimum display time (i.e. threshold; ranging from 50 to 1,000 ms) that is necessary to distinguish a fake from a genuine smile. Variants of fake smiles were created by varying the type of non-happy (e.g. neutral, angry, sad, etc.) eyes in blended expressions with a smiling mouth. Participants judged whether faces conveyed happiness or not. Results showed that thresholds vary as a function of type of eyes: blended expressions with angry eyes are discriminated early (100 ms), followed by those with disgusted eyes, fearful, and sad (from 250 to 500 ms), surprised (750 ms), and neutral (from 750 to 1,000 ms) eyes. An important issue for further research is the extent to which such discrimination threshold differences depend on physical or affective factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated whether social anxiety facilitates the discrimination between genuine and ambiguous smiles. Socially anxious (N=20) and nonanxious (N=20) participants categorized as “happy” or “not happy” faces with either (1) a truly happy expression (i.e., happy eyes and a smile), (2) truly nonhappy expressions (e.g., angry eyes and an angry mouth), or (3) blended expressions with a smiling mouth and nonhappy (e.g., angry, sad, etc.) eyes. Results indicated that, relative to nonanxious participants, those high in social anxiety weremore likelyto judge as “not happy” any blended expression with nonhappy eyes, and they werefasterin judging as “not happy” the blended expressions with angry, fearful, or disgusted eyes (but not those with sad, surprised, or neutral eyes). These results suggest, respectively, that social anxiety inhibits a benign interpretation ofallthe ambiguous expressions with a smile, and speeds up the detection ofthreateningeyes in such expressions. Importantly, no differences appeared as a function of social anxiety for truly happy or nonhappy faces. This rules out a response-bias explanation, and also reveals that social anxiety does not affect sensitivity in the recognition of prototypical expressions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Pictures of emotionally neutral, positive, and negative (threat- or harm-related) scenes were presented for 3 seconds, paired with nonemotional control pictures. The eye fixations of high and low trait anxiety participants were monitored. Intensity of stimulus emotionality was varied, with two levels of perceptual salience for each picture (colour vs. greyscale). Regardless of perceptual salience, high anxiety was associated with preferential attention: (a) towards all types of emotional stimuli in initial orienting, as revealed by a higher probability of first fixation on the emotional picture than on the neutral picture of a pair; (b) towards positive and harm stimuli in a subsequent stage of early engagement, as shown by longer viewing times during the first 500 ms following onset of the pictures; and with (c) attention away from (i.e., avoidance) harm stimuli in a later phase, as indicated by shorter viewing times and lower frequency of fixation during the last 1000 ms of picture exposure. This suggests that the nature of the attentional bias varies as a function of the time course in the processing of emotional pictures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In two experiments, prime face stimuli with an emotional or a neutral expression were presented individually for 25 to 125 ms, either in foveal or parafoveal vision; following a mask, a probe face or a word label appeared for recognition. Accurate detection and sensitivity (A′) were higher for angry, happy, and sad faces than for nonemotional (neutral) or novel (scheming) faces at short exposure times (25-75 ms), in both the foveal and the parafoveal field, and with both the probe face and the probe word. These results indicate that there is a low perceptual threshold for unambiguous emotional faces, which are especially likely to be detected both within and outside the focus of attention; and that this facilitated detection involves processing of the affective meaning of faces, not only discrimination of formal visual features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Low and high trait anxiety undergraduates were presented with physical-threat, ego-threat, positive, and neutral words. Following an orienting task promoting lexical--but not semantic--processing, unexpected free recall or recognition tests were presented. High anxiety participants showed increased correct recall of both types of threat-related words, but also increased incorrect recall (intrusions) and incorrect recognition (false alarms) of these words. Furthermore, participants high in anxiety had reduced sensitivity ( d ′) for ego-threat words, and reduced cautiousness ( β ) for physical-threat words. This tendency to report threat-related information regardless of prior presentation suggests that there is a response bias rather than a memory bias in anxiety. In addition, this bias is likely to be mediated by depression insofar as physical-threat information is concerned, although the bias can be attributed to trait anxiety insofar as ego-threat information is concerned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Six experiments examined a bias in the probability and the time course of predictive inferences as a function of individual differences in emotional proneness and the adaptive importance of stimuli. Participants high or low in trait anxiety read context sentences predictive of potentially threatening events or nonthreat events. The contexts were followed by a target word to be named, which represented the predicted event or an unlikely event. Context constraints, the context presentation rate, and the interval between the context and the target word were manipulated. Evidence for inferences involved facilitation (shorter latencies) in naming the inferential target words following the predicting context, relative to when these words followed a control context. Predictive inferences were activated when there was congruence between anxiety and the threat content of stimuli, regardless of context constraints. The time course of predictive inferences was constant across context presentation rate; they occurred with considerable delay (1,050 ms) after the context but not earlier (i.e., 50 or 550 ms). We discuss the relevance and the integration of these findings with current models and research on inference processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eye fixations during reading were monitored to examine the relationship between individual differences in working memory capacity—as assessed by the reading span task—and inferences about predictable events. Context sentences predicting likely events, or non-predicting control sentences, were presented. They were followed by continuation sentences in which a target word represented an event to be inferred (inferential word) or an unlikely event (non-predictable word). A main effect of reading span showed that high working memory capacity was related to shorter gaze durations across sentence regions. More specific findings involved an interaction between context, target, and reading span on late processing measures and regions. Thus, for high- but not for low-span readers, the predicting condition, relative to the control condition, facilitated reanalysis of the continuation sentence that represented the inference concept. This effect was revealed by a reduction in regression-path reading time in the last region of the sentence, involving less time reading that region and fewer regressions from it. These results indicate that working memory facilitates elaborative inferences during reading, but that this occurs at late text-integration processes, rather than at early lexical-access processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of event uncertainty on inferences predictive of threat was investigated in high and low trait anxious individuals. Participants read context sentences predicting threat or nonthreat outcomes. They subsequently named target words that were consistent with or unrelated to prediction. In Experiment 1, with predictability relatively low, anxious participants showed clear threat bias in their inferences: Although nonthreat targets were unaffected by context, shorter naming latencies were found for threat target words that followed a threat predicting context. A low anxiety group showed an opposite effect, that is, facilitation only for nonthreat words, suggesting an avoidance (of threat) bias. In Experiment 2, under higher predictability, this bias disappeared, as both high and low anxious groups performed similarly. The relevance of these data for different models of selective processing in anxiety is discussed. Of particular pertinence is the finding that, with increasing stimulus threat, low anxious participants no longer show avoidance; instead, they infer threat in a way similar to the high anxious. This suggests that the difference between the high and the low anxious persons resides in the threshold at which stimulus threat input is processed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The time course of a bias in predicting danger as a function of a repressive coping style was examined. The participants belonged to repressor, low - anxious, or high - anxious groups. They read context sentences predictive of threat or nonthreat event outcomes, followed by target words for rapid naming representing the outcomes. The interval between context and target word was 50 ms (Experiment 1), 550 ms (Experiment 2), or 1050 ms (Experiments 3 and 4). There was bias for naming words confirming threatening outcomes: (a) for repressors in the 550-ms delay condition; and (b) for high - anxiety participants in the 1050-ms delay condition. Repressive coping facilitated early processing of threat, but inhibited late processing, whereas high anxiety was characterised by sustained vigilance for threat. There were clear differences in threat processing by repressors and the low - anxious participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of context constraints on the time course of predictive inferences during reading was investigated. Constraints (low vs. medium vs. high) were determined by manipulations of a context sentence that affected the extent to which an event was predictable. The time course was assessed by variations in the delay (50 vs. 550 vs. 1050 ms) between the context to be read and a target word to be named. This word represented either the predicted event (inferential target) or an unlikely event (non-predictable target). With a 1050-ms delay, there was facilitation in naming the inferential target word following the predicting context, relative to a control context, regardless of the degree of constraints. With a 550-ms delay, facilitation did not occur unless there were high constraints, even if the context presentation rate was slowed down. With a 50-ms delay, facilitation was not observed even under high constraints. It is concluded that enhanced context constraints speed the time course of predictive inferencing to some extent: under enhanced constraints, predictive inferences are made earlier, but do not become automatic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents information on a study which examined discrepancies between subjective and objective measures of state anxiety as a function of test anxiety in undergraduate students. Description of test anxiety; Response systems of state anxiety; Methodology; Results and discussion.

A naming task assessed activation of inference concepts during reading. Apredicting, or a control, context sentence was followed by a target word to be named, which represented the predicted event or an inconsistent event. The interval between the end of the context and the onset of the target word varied between 50 and 1050-msec. Individual differences in working memory capacity were assessed by the reading span task. As reflected by facilitation in naming latencies in the predicting condition, relative to the control condition, (a) inferences were not made within the first 50-msec after the context, regardless of reading span; (b) only the high-span participants drew inferences within a 550-msec interval; and, (c) both the high-and the low-span participants generated them within a 1050-msec interval. These results indicate that high working memory capacity accelerates the time course of predictive inferences, although they do not become automatic. We propose that this effect occurs because these inferences involve time-consuming elaborations that place demands on the effortful and limited resources of working memory. Deficiencies in word knowledge, speed of lexical access, or comprehension of explicit information do not account for low-span readers' difficulties in generating predictive inferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Naming and word reading times were used to investigate the time course of predictive inferences. Priming contexts were followed to disambiguating sentences in which a target word either confirmed or disconfirmed the consequence suggested by the context. In Experiment l, sentences were presented word by word at a predetermined pace; readers pronounced the target word, which appeared either 500 or 1250 ms after the onset of the last word in the priming context. In Experiment 2, the participants read sentences one to four words at a time using the self-paced moving-window technique; reading times for the target word, the posttarget region, and the last word in the disambiguating sentence were collected. There was facilitation (a) in naming the confirming target word when it was primed in the 1250-ms stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), but not in the 500-ms SOA; and (b) in reading the confirming target word plus the posttarget region (spill-over effect), but not in the target word itself. These results suggest that predictive inferences occur on-line, but require time to be drawn and that they are initially encoded to some degree, but completed later. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three experimentsinvestigated the tendency of high-anxiety individuals to interpretambiguous information in a threatening fashion. Priming ambiguous sentences (concerned with ego-threat, physical-threat, or non-threat events) were presented, followed by a disambiguating sentence in which a target word either confirmed or disconfirmed the consequence implied by the priming context. The sentences were presented word-by-word at a predetermined pace. Subjects read the sentences and pronounced the target word (naming task), which appeared either 500 msec or 1,250 msec after the onset of the last word (pre-target word) in the priming context. Results indicated that high-anxiety subjects named target words confirming threats faster than low-anxiety subjects, relative to non-threat words. Furthermore, this interpretative bias is: (a) strategic, rather than automatic, as it occurred with a 1,250-msec SOA, but not with a 500-msec SOA; (b) temporary, as it was found under evaluative stress conditions increasing state anxiety, butnot withnon-stress; and (c) specificto ego-threats, as it happened with ambiguous information concerning self-esteem and social evaluation, rather than with physical-threat-related information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Texts were presented sentence by sentence (Experiment 1) or word by word (Experiment 2) at a fixed rate to subjects high or low in test anxiety, under various conditions: no interference, concurrent articulatory suppression, and concurrent irrelevant speech (presented auditorily). High-anxiety subjects produced overt articulation more frequently than low-anxiety subjects, especially in the irrelevant speech condition. The most salient finding was an interaction between anxiety and interference on comprehension performance: under word-by-word-but not under sentence-by-sentence-presentation, anxious subjects showed poorer comprehension than non-anxious subjects in both conditions known to interfere with the articulatory loop (i.e. articulatory suppression, and irrelevant speech), but equivalent comprehension in the no interference condition. These findings suggest (a) that the articulatory loop has a special compensatory role for anxious individuals in reading comprehension, and (b) that the importance of this auxiliary mechanism is enhanced when other strategies, such as regressive fixations and control of reading speed, cannot be used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effects of a 12-week exercise-training program on cognitive, somatic, and behavioral anxiety and on heart rate responses to evaluative stress were scrutinized in 89 subjects randomly assigned to an experimental (exercise) or a control group. The training program consisted of exercises that were aimed to the improvement of the general physical fitness (i.e., strength, flexibility, and endurance). Following the 12-week training period, exercising subjects showed improved motor skill capacity as well as higher VO2 max. In an anxiety inciting test situation, that consisted of the video-taped delivery of a 5-min speech, a mental arithmetic and a fine motor task, exercising subjects showed more favourable responses than control subjects in three ways: (a) they exhibited lower behavioral anxiety during the anticipation phase of the three stressors, (b) they reported lower cognitive and somatic anxiety during the anxiety provoking situation, and (c) their heart rate recovered faster, in contrast to both their baseline heart rate and the control subjects' heart rate, from the stress episode. These results demonstrate that a fitness-oriented exercise program has anxiolytic properties. They also provide a primary evidence that overt behavioral anxiety, as opposed to the usually measured self-reported anxiety, may be affected by exercise. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The effects of test anxiety and evaluative stress on reading speed, articulatory rehearsal, reading regressions, and comprehension were examined. High- and low-test-anxiety subjects read texts under conditions of stress (Studies 1, 2 and 3) or non-stress (Study 4). Texts were presented either with concurrent irrelevant speech (heard), an articulatory suppression task, or no concurrent task. Measures of working memory span and prior vacabulary knowledge were collected under non-stress conditions (Study 5). There were no differences in comprehension performance as a function of anxiety, but high anxious subjects were less efficient than low-anxious subjects, as the former employed more reading time and regressions, though not more articulation, than the latter to obtain an equivalent comprehension score. Reading regressions emerged as the most discriminating compensatory strategy associated with anxiety. This reduced efficiency is partly dependent on a basic deficit in vocabulary knowledge—but not in memory span—, and it is partly transitory and dependent on the presence of external evaluative stress. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The hypotheses that test anxiety is associated with a deficit in prior knowledge and/or working memory capacity, that anxiety impairs comprehension efficiency, and that deficits in knowledge and capacity underlie the efficiency impairment, were tested. In Study 1, high-anxiety students were characterized by lower scores in several vocabulary measures, compared with low-anxiety students. In Study 2, high-anxiety individuals showed inferior working memory capacity to low-anxiety individuals under evaluative stress conditions, but not under non-stress conditions. In Study 3 high-anxiety subjects exhibited lower efficiency scores than low-anxiety subjects in expository texts without a summary: The former employed a greater amount of reading time than the latter to acquire an equivalent amount of information. In addition, the disadvantage in efficiency associated with anxiety was removed when differences in vocabulary knowledge were partialled out statistically. Instead, that disadvantage was only reduced, but not eliminated, when differences in transitory working memory capacity were partialled out. Therefore, the prior knowledge deficit hypothesis accounts for the impairment in reading efficiency associated with high anxiety better than the transitory working memory reduction hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]