Implicitly and explicitly assessed anxiety: No relationships with recognition of and brain response to facial emotions.
Trait anxiety, the disposition to experience anxiety, is known to facilitate perception of threats. Trait anxious individuals seem to identify threatening stimuli such as fearful facial expressions more accurately, especially when presented under temporal constraints. In past studies on anxiety and emotion face recognition, only self-report or explicit measures of anxiety have been administered. Implicit measures represent indirect tests allowing to circumvent problems associated with self-report. In our study, we made use of implicit in addition to explicit measures to investigate the relationships of trait anxiety with recognition of and brain response to emotional faces. 75 healthy young volunteers had to identify briefly presented (67 ms) fearful, angry, happy, and neutral facial expressions masked by neutral faces while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. The Implicit Association Test, the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory and the Beck Anxiety Inventory were applied as implicit and explicit measures of trait anxiety. After corrections for multiple testing, neither implicitly nor explicitly measured anxiety correlated with recognition of emotional facial expressions. Moreover, implicitly and explicitly assessed anxiety was not linked to brain response to emotional faces. Our data suggest links between discrimination accuracy and brain response to facial emotions. Activation of the caudate nucleus seems be of particular importance for recognizing fear and happiness from facial expressions. Processes of somatosensory resonance appear to be involved in identifying fear from facial expressions. The present data indicate that, regardless of assessment method, trait anxiety does not affect the recognition of fear or other emotions as has been proposed previously.
['Suslow|Thomas|T|', 'Hußlack|Anja|A|', 'Bujanow|Anna|A|', 'Henkelmann|Jeanette|J|', 'Kersting|Anette|A|', 'Hoffmann|Karl-Titus|KT|', 'Egloff|Boris|B|', 'Lobsien|Donald|D|', 'Günther|Vivien|V|']
D000328:Adult D001007:Anxiety D001244:Association D001921:Brain D004644:Emotions D005149:Facial Expression D000066499:Facial Recognition D005260:Female D006801:Humans D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging D008297:Male D014796:Visual Perception D055815:Young Adult
trait anxiety functional magnetic resonance imaging implicit association test emotional facial expression state–trait anxiety inventory visual perception