SOCIAL ANXIETY, FEAR OF NEGATIVE EVALUATION AND THE DETECTION OF NEGATIVE EMOTION IN OTHERS

The present study sought to investigate whether social anxiety is asso ciated with enhanced ability to detect negative emotion in others. Sub jects scoring high and low on Fear of Negative Evaluation (FNE) perfor med two tasks before and after a social threat induction. The first ta sk involved identifying the affect (negative vs neutral) in briefly pr esented (60 msec) slides of faces. The second involved rating the over all emotion conveyed in brief video clips of an actor and detecting di screpancies in the affect conveyed by the visual and auditory channels of the video. Overall the results suggest that high social anxiety su bjects have a bias towards identifying others' emotional expressions a s negative in the absence of an enhanced ability to discriminate betwe en different emotional states in others. Implications and limitations of the results are discussed.