Huai-Hsuan Tseng1,2, Yu-Lien Huang3, Jian-Ting Chen4, Kuei-Yu Liang5, Chao-Cheng Lin6,7, Sue-Huei Chen8. 1. a Department of Psychiatry , National Cheng Kung University Hospital, College of Medicine, National Cheng Kung University , Tainan , Taiwan. 2. b Department of Psychosis Studies , Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London , London , UK. 3. c Department of Psychology , Fo Gung University , Yilan , Taiwan. 4. d Department of General Psychiatry , Bali Psychiatric Center , New Taipei , Taiwan. 5. e Department of Psychiatry , Wei Gong Memorial Hospital , Miaoli City , Taiwan. 6. f Department of Psychiatry , National Taiwan University Hospital College of Medicine , Taipei , Taiwan. 7. g Yujie Clinic , Taipei , Taiwan. 8. h Department of Psychology , National Taiwan University , Taipei , Taiwan.
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Patients with social anxiety disorder (SAD) have a cognitive preference to negatively evaluate emotional information. In particular, the preferential biases in prosodic emotion recognition in SAD have been much less explored. The present study aims to investigate whether SAD patients retain negative evaluation biases across visual and auditory modalities when given sufficient response time to recognise emotions. METHODS: Thirty-one SAD patients and 31 age- and gender-matched healthy participants completed a culturally suitable non-verbal emotion recognition task and received clinical assessments for social anxiety and depressive symptoms. A repeated measures analysis of variance was conducted to examine group differences in emotion recognition. RESULTS: Compared to healthy participants, SAD patients were significantly less accurate at recognising facial and prosodic emotions, and spent more time on emotion recognition. The differences were mainly driven by the lower accuracy and longer reaction times for recognising fearful emotions in SAD patients. Within the SAD patients, lower accuracy of sad face recognition was associated with higher severity of depressive and social anxiety symptoms, particularly with avoidance symptoms. CONCLUSION: These findings may represent a cross-modality pattern of avoidance in the later stage of identifying negative emotions in SAD. This pattern may be linked to clinical symptom severity.
INTRODUCTION:Patients with social anxiety disorder (SAD) have a cognitive preference to negatively evaluate emotional information. In particular, the preferential biases in prosodic emotion recognition in SAD have been much less explored. The present study aims to investigate whether SADpatients retain negative evaluation biases across visual and auditory modalities when given sufficient response time to recognise emotions. METHODS: Thirty-one SADpatients and 31 age- and gender-matched healthy participants completed a culturally suitable non-verbal emotion recognition task and received clinical assessments for social anxiety and depressive symptoms. A repeated measures analysis of variance was conducted to examine group differences in emotion recognition. RESULTS: Compared to healthy participants, SADpatients were significantly less accurate at recognising facial and prosodic emotions, and spent more time on emotion recognition. The differences were mainly driven by the lower accuracy and longer reaction times for recognising fearful emotions in SADpatients. Within the SADpatients, lower accuracy of sad face recognition was associated with higher severity of depressive and social anxiety symptoms, particularly with avoidance symptoms. CONCLUSION: These findings may represent a cross-modality pattern of avoidance in the later stage of identifying negative emotions in SAD. This pattern may be linked to clinical symptom severity.
Authors: Tai-Ling Liu; Peng-Wei Wang; Yi-Hsin Connie Yang; Gary Chon-Wen Shyi; Cheng-Fang Yen Journal: Int J Environ Res Public Health Date: 2019-12-15 Impact factor: 3.390