Social anxiety is prevalent, estimated to affect 7% to 13% of the population during the lifetime. It is also often very disruptive, affecting well-being and bearing numerous social and economic burdens. Broadly, the proposed research seeks to further an understanding of social anxiety at behavioral and neurobiological levels of analysis for enhancing treatment and helping pave the way for better prevention and recovery. The proposed research will shed light on basic perceptual and affective biases in social anxiety, and the results will be able to be used for better clinical intervention. Prior research suggests that socially anxious individuals show an abnormal attentional bias toward threatening social cues, such as an angry face. It is possible that a heightened attention to threatening social cues could impair socially anxious individuals'ability to process important context cues (e.g., non-angry cues of the body) that need to be used to appropriately perceive other's emotions. If true, an underutilization of context cues might lead socially anxious individuals to have misguided perceptions of and affective reactions to others'emotions.
The specific aims of the proposed research are to (a) examine how context cues influence perceptual judgments of emotional faces in social anxiety;(b) examine how context cues influence affective reactions to emotional faces in social anxiety;and (c) identify the neural basis of these contextual influences. This will be examined in 6 studies. The first 2 studies will examine whether individuals high in social anxiety (relative to low) show impairments in incorporating emotional body contexts (Study 1A) and semantic contexts (Study 1B) into their perceptions of facial emotion, assessed using an emotion-categorization task. If socially anxious individuals show impairments in incorporating context cues into their perceptions of emotional faces, the faces are likely to trigger misguided affective responses. The following 2 studies will use an affective priming paradigm to test whether individuals high in social anxiety (relative to low) show misguided affective responses to emotional faces accompanied by emotional body contexts (Study 2A) and semantic contexts (Study 2B). Lastly, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) will be used to identify the neural basis of socially anxious individuals'impairments in context- cue processing when reacting to emotional faces, both in body contexts (Study 3A) and semantic contexts (Study 3B). Across the 6 studies, it is hypothesized that perceptual, affective, and neural responses to emotional faces will reflect utilization of context cues in individuals low in social anxiety, but that this utilization will be disrupted in individuals high in social anxiety. These results will have important implications for understanding and treating social anxiety.
The proposed research seeks to further an understanding of social anxiety at behavioral and neurobiological levels of analysis for enhancing treatment and helping pave the way for better prevention and recovery. This research will shed light on basic perceptual and affective biases in social anxiety. The results will have important implications for the understanding and clinical intervention of social anxiety.
| Freeman, Jonathan B; Ma, Yina; Barth, Maria et al. (2015) The neural basis of contextual influences on face categorization. Cereb Cortex 25:415-22 |
| Freeman, Jonathan B; Ma, Yina; Han, Shihui et al. (2013) Influences of Culture and Visual Context on Real-Time Social Categorization. J Exp Soc Psychol 49:206-210 |
| Freeman, Jonathan B; Dale, Rick (2013) Assessing bimodality to detect the presence of a dual cognitive process. Behav Res Methods 45:83-97 |
| Freeman, Jonathan B; Penner, Andrew M; Saperstein, Aliya et al. (2011) Looking the part: social status cues shape race perception. PLoS One 6:e25107 |
| Freeman, Jonathan B; Ambady, Nalini (2011) Hand movements reveal the time-course of shape and pigmentation processing in face categorization. Psychon Bull Rev 18:705-12 |
