Examining Featural Processing of Emotional Facial Expressions: Is Trait Anxiety a Factor?

Previous literature is largely inconsistent regarding how individuals with trait anxiety recognize emotional facial expressions, making this process poorly understood. For example, some research has found that individuals with high-trait anxiety demonstrate greater accuracy for the emotional facial expressions of fear while other studies have not observed such differences. Given more recent developments in the processing (i.e., featural and holistic) of emotional facial expressions, our goal for this study is to clarify the inconsistencies reported by previous research by examining featural and holistic processing during an emotion recognition task. The task involved 24 expressions of the 6 basic emotions (e.g., anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise) presented in 5 conditions (mouth only, eyes/brows only, mouth hidden, eyes/brows hidden, and full face) which elucidate whether facial areas (e.g., mouth and eyes/brows) are necessary or sufficient. The results supported previous findings regarding the recognition the parttern of the six basic emotions. Interestingly, highly trait anxious people were found to be inferior at correctly recognizing all negative emotions. Furthermore, while viewing times did not reveal differences in processing as a function of trait anxiety, through more intricate analyses, individuals with high-trait anxiety were found to be less accurate when the mouth area was presented alone. These findings suggest that individuals with trait anxiety do deviate from the patterns of emotional facial processing typically found in the literature. Public Significance Statement As anxiety is a common mental health issue, a better understanding of emotional processing and recognition in an individual with high anxiety is important. The current article reveals that individuals with high levels of anxiety have more difficulty recognizing negative emotions.