ABSTRACT

Background and Objectives

Individuals with social anxiety disorder show pronounced perceptual biases in social contexts, such as being hypervigilant to threat and discounting positive social cues. Parasympathetic activity influences responses to the social environment and may underlie these biases. This study examined the associations among social anxiety symptoms, heart rate variability (HRV), and vocal emotion recognition.

Design and Method

Female undergraduate students (N = 124) self-reported their social anxiety symptoms using the Social Anxiety Disorder Dimensional Scale and completed a computerized vocal emotion recognition task using stimuli from the Ryerson Audio-Visual Database of Emotional Speech and Song stimulus set. HRV was measured at baseline and during the emotion recognition task.

Results

Women with more social anxiety symptoms had higher emotion recognition accuracy (p = .021) and rated positive stimuli as less intense (p = .032). Additionally, although those with greater social anxiety symptoms did not have lower resting HRV (p = .459), they did have lower task HRV (p = .026), which mediated their lower positivity bias and greater recognition accuracy.

Conclusions

A parasympathetically-mediated positivity bias may indicate or facilitate normal social functioning in women. Additionally, HRV during a symptom- or disorder-relevant task may predict task performance and reveal parasympathetic differences that are not found at baseline.

中文翻译：

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女性的社交焦虑症状、心率变异性和声音情绪识别：副交感神经介导的积极偏见的证据

摘要

背景和目标

社交焦虑症患者在社交环境中表现出明显的知觉偏见，例如对威胁高度警惕和忽视积极的社交线索。副交感神经活动影响对社会环境的反应，并可能成为这些偏见的基础。这项研究检查了社交焦虑症状、心率变异性 (HRV) 和声音情绪识别之间的关联。

设计与方法

女本科生 ( N =  124) 使用社交焦虑障碍维度量表自我报告他们的社交焦虑症状，并使用来自情绪言语和歌曲刺激集的瑞尔森视听数据库的刺激完成计算机化的声音情绪识别任务。在基线和情绪识别任务期间测量 HRV。

结果

具有更多社交焦虑症状的女性具有更高的情绪识别准确度 ( p =  .021)，并且认为积极刺激不那么强烈 ( p =  .032)。此外，尽管社交焦虑症状较严重的人没有较低的静息 HRV ( p =  .459)，但他们的任务 HRV 确实较低 ( p =  .026)，这调节了他们较低的积极偏见和较高的识别准确度。

结论

副交感神经介导的积极偏见可能表明或促进女性的正常社会功能。此外，在与症状或障碍相关的任务期间的 HRV 可以预测任务表现并揭示在基线时未发现的副交感神经差异。