Background

Emotion perception is essential to human interaction and relies on effective integration of emotional cues across sensory modalities. Despite initial evidence for anxiety-related biases in multisensory processing of emotional information, there is no research to date that directly addresses whether the mechanism of multisensory integration is altered by anxiety. Here, we compared audiovisual integration of emotional cues between individuals with low vs. high trait anxiety.

Methods

Participants were 62 young adults who were assessed on their ability to quickly and accurately identify happy, angry and sad emotions from dynamic visual-only, audio-only and audiovisual face and voice displays.

Results

The results revealed that individuals in the high anxiety group were more likely to integrate angry faces and voices in a statistically optimal fashion, as predicted by the Maximum Likelihood Estimation model, compared to low anxiety individuals. This means that high anxiety individuals achieved higher precision in correctly recognising anger from angry audiovisual stimuli compared to angry face or voice-only stimuli, and compared to low anxiety individuals.

Limitations

We tested a higher proportion of females, and although this does reflect the higher prevalence of clinical anxiety among females in the general population, potential sex differences in multisensory mechanisms due to anxiety should be examined in future studies.

Conclusions

Individuals with high trait anxiety have multisensory mechanisms that are especially fine-tuned for processing threat-related emotions. This bias may exhaust capacity for processing of other emotional stimuli and lead to overly negative evaluations of social interactions.

中文翻译：

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高特质焦虑增强了听觉和视觉威胁线索的最佳整合

背景

情感感知对于人类互动至关重要，并且依赖于跨感官模式的情感线索的有效整合。尽管在情绪信息的多感官处理中存在与焦虑相关的偏见的初步证据，但迄今为止还没有研究直接解决多感官整合的机制是否会因焦虑而改变。在这里，我们比较了低与高特质焦虑个体之间情感线索的视听整合。

方法

参与者是 62 名年轻人，他们评估了他们从动态的纯视觉、纯音频和视听面部和语音显示中快速准确地识别快乐、愤怒和悲伤情绪的能力。

结果

结果表明，与低焦虑人群相比，高焦虑人群中的个体更有可能以统计上最佳的方式整合愤怒的面孔和声音，正如最大似然估计模型所预测的那样。这意味着与愤怒的面部或仅语音的刺激相比，与低焦虑的个体相比，高焦虑个体在正确识别来自愤怒视听刺激的愤怒方面获得了更高的准确度。

限制

我们测试了更高比例的女性，尽管这确实反映了一般人群中女性临床焦虑的患病率较高，但在未来的研究中应检查由焦虑引起的多感官机制的潜在性别差异。

结论

具有高度特质焦虑的人具有多感官机制，特别适合处理与威胁相关的情绪。这种偏见可能会耗尽处理其他情绪刺激的能力，并导致对社交互动的过度负面评价。