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Anxious adults judge facial cues faster, but less accurately
James Kloeppel,
Science Editor
217-244-1073, kloeppel@uiuc.edu
7/7/2006
|
CHAMPAIGN, Ill.
– Adults
who are highly anxious can perceive changes in facial expressions more
quickly than adults who are less anxious, a new study shows. By jumping
to emotional conclusions, however, highly anxious adults may make more
errors in judgment and perpetuate a cycle of conflict and misunderstanding
in their relationships.
“Facial cues play an important role in how individuals perceive
information that is relevant to attachment concerns,” said study
co-author R. Chris Fraley, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Our findings
suggest that highly anxious individuals – people who are very
insecure about their relationships – are more vigilant in monitoring
the facial cues of others, but also make more mistakes in interpreting
the emotional states behind facial expressions.”
To investigate the relationship between attachment style and perception
of facial cues, Fraley and his collaborators asked participants to view
movies of faces in which the expression gradually changed from emotional
to neutral, or vice versa. The participants were instructed to stop
the movie at the point at which the expression had changed. The researchers
report their findings in the August issue of the Journal of Personality.
“We found that highly anxious people tended to judge the change
in facial expressions faster than less-anxious people,” Fraley
said. “Importantly, highly anxious individuals also tended to
make more perceptual errors than less-anxious individuals.”
Highly anxious adults were more sensitive and much more likely to jump
to emotional conclusions, thus underpinning their ability to perceive
emotions accurately, the researchers found. Indeed, when highly anxious
adults were forced to take the same amount of time as everyone else,
they were able to judge emotional states more accurately than less-anxious
adults.
“This ‘hair trigger’ style of perceptual sensitivity
may be one reason why highly anxious people experience greater conflict
in their relationships,” Fraley said. “The irony is that
they have the ability to make their judgments more accurately than less-anxious
people, but, because they are so quick to make judgments about others’
emotions, they tend to mistakenly infer other people’s emotional
states and intentions.”
With Fraley, the paper’s co-authors are psychologist Paula M.
Niedenthal at the National Center for Scientific Research and the University
of Clermont-Ferrand in France, and Illinois graduate students Michael
Marks, Claudia Brumbaugh and Amanda Vicary.
Editor’s
note: To reach Chris Fraley, call 217-333-3486; e-mail: rcfraley@uiuc.edu.
