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Fixation maps for the low and high shyness participants in the learning and reviewing phase. A) Fixation map for the low shyness participants, B) Fixation map for the high shyness participants, and C) Fixation difference map calculated by subtracting the high shyness group from the low shyness group. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0052203.g003
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The current study explored the relationship between shyness and face scanning patterns for own- and other-race faces in adults. Participants completed a shyness inventory and a face recognition task in which their eye movements were recorded by a Tobii 1750 eye tracker. We found that: (1) Participants’ shyness scores were negatively correlated with...
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Context 1
... fixation data across all face races were analyzed with the iMap method, from which we obtained maps of fixation duration for both the low shyness group and the high shyness group. We also obtained a raw map of the fixation differences between the low shyness and high shyness groups (low shyness -high shyness) in the learning and reviewing phase (Figure 3) and in the recognition phase (Figure 4). All maps are in Z values. ...
Context 2
... showing a significant fixation difference are delimited by white borders (p,.05, corrected). In the third column of both Figures 3 and 4, hot colors (i.e., red) denote greater fixations by low shyness participants than high shyness participants and cold colors (i.e., blue) denote greater fixations by high shyness participants than low shyness partici- pants. Values near zero (or white color) indicate similar magnitude in fixation duration between the two categories of participants. ...
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The purpose of the present study is to find out whether there is a significant correlation between university students' social anxiety and their coping with stress styles, and whether coping with stress styles predict social anxiety at a significant level. The findings of the study show that there are significant negative correlations between self...
Citations
... Anxiety was measured using the STAI in several studies [19,29,36], while other studies used varying rating scales measuring affect (including anxiety symptoms) on a continuum [30, 63,67]. Three studies measured non-induced anxiety symptoms, with one study [47] measuring intergroup anxiety, one study [38] measuring social anxiety and another [68], shyness (which is associated with social anxiety). ...
... Further, all studies reporting the outcome of the manipulation inducing anxiety were successful. Experiment two of the study by Wilson et al. [67] did not report the effectiveness of the anxiety manipulation, as did the study by Wang et al [68]. Only studies with a reported successful anxiety manipulation are discussed due to the inability of determining anxiety impact without a successful anxiety manipulation. ...
... Therefore, the lack of interaction between anxiety and race found in the study by Kikutani [38], might have occurred due to stimuli-valence impacting this relationship [75]. The uncontrolled stimuli-valence in several other studies reviewed [29,36,63,68], might have also impaired the ability to find an interaction through masking effects caused by heightened error of measurement and statistical noise [75]. Future studies need to experimentally control for stimuli-valence when seeking to explore the interaction between anxiety and race. ...
Wrongful convictions continue to occur through eyewitness misidentification. Recognising what factors, or interaction between factors, affect face-recognition is therefore imperative. Extensive research indicates that face-recognition accuracy is impacted by anxiety and by race. Limited research, however, has examined how these factors interact to potentially exacerbate face-recognition deficits. Brigham (2008) suggests that anxiety exacerbates other-race face-recognition deficits. Conversely, Attentional Control Theory predicts that anxiety exacerbates deficits for all faces. This systematic review examined existing studies investigating the possible interaction between anxiety and face-race to compare these theories. Recent studies included in this review found that both anxiety and race influence face-recognition accuracy but found no interaction. Potential moderators existing in reviewed studies, however, might have influenced their results. Separately, in some studies reviewed, anxiety induced during retrieval impacted recognition, contrasting with the conclusions of previous reviews. Recommendations for future research are given to address moderators potentially impacting results observed previously.
... However, participants who have depression or who are shy, shameful, anxious or have feelings of inadequacy had more difficulty recognizing precisely joyful expressions (e.g., Gotlib, Krasnoperova, Yue, & Joormann, 2004;Gilbert et al., 2006) than participants who experienced none of these. Wang, Hu, Short, and Fu (2012) assumed that the first category of participants tends to avoid direct eye contact during emotion recognition as the participants' shyness scores were negatively correlated with fixation on the eyes. Self-criticism is significantly associated with shyness and shame (Gilbert & Miles, 2000). ...
... Participants with high levels of anxiety held their gaze for less time overall and for bouts of shorter duration when they were talking. Research findings have supported the idea that self-criticism and a low level of self-reassurance are related to anxiety, shame, feelings of inferiority, or inadequacy (Blatt et al., 1992) and are possible markers of gaze avoidance (e.g., Daly, 1978;Wang, Hu, Short, & Fu, 2012). Despite confirmation of a relationship between self-criticism on the one hand and depression, anxiety, social anxiety on the other (Blatt et al., 1992;Gilbert, 2011), there is a lack of research on the relationship between gaze (avoidance) and self-criticism/self-reassurance in facial expression recognition. ...
... It is believed that highly selfcritical people tend to have low self-reassurance and that people with high self-reassurance tend to be less self-critical (Gilbert, 2010). Given previous findings related to concepts associated with self-criticism, such as anxiety, shame, and non-dominance (Daly, 1978;Terburg & van Honk, 2012;Wang, Hu, Short, & Fu, 2012), we were interested in the mechanisms underpinning specific patterns in the identification of the emotion of happiness in relation to level of self-criticism and self-reassurance. ...
This study explores the relationship between self-criticism, self-reassurance, and the face scanning patterns participants use to recognize photos of happiness. Forty-two participants were being recorded by eye-trackers while watching photos of happy and neutral facial expressions. Participants also completed the Forms of Self-Criticising/Attacking and Self-Reassuring Scale. The Hated Self score was negatively related to the total fixation duration on the eyes and around the eyes. The Inadequate Self score tended to correlate positively with the total fixation duration time on all examined areas of the face and Reassured Self score tended to correlate positively with the total fixation duration time on the area around the eyes, although none of these correlations appeared to be statistically significant. Being able to distinguish between the more pathological Hated Self form of self-criticism and the less pathological Inadequate Self could improve psychological assessment and intervention evaluations.
... However, there are studies showing that individuals with anxiety, depression, unhealthy perfectionism and feelings of self-inadequacy, but also self-critical people, have distinct difficulty recognizing and responding to positive/affirmative emotions and pay much more attention to negative/threatening emotional expressions Gilbert and Procter 2006;Longe et al. 2010). It has also been found that different patterns of scanning emotional expressions may be responsible for the false recognition of emotion (e.g., Phillipou et al. 2015;Wang et al. 2012). ...
... The social-phobia participants tended to avoid facial features, particularly the eyes and to scan nonfeatures instead. Wang et al. (2012) explored the relation between shyness and face-scanning patterns. Researchers found that participants' shyness scores were negatively correlated with a fixation on the eyes regardless of the race of the person they were observing. ...
... (1) Higher Self-criticism (Inadequate Self and/or Hated Self FSCRS score) predicts a lower total fixation time on the eye area of a person exhibiting a primary-emotion facial expression (Daly 1978;Farabee et al. 1993;Horley et al. 2003;Wang et al. 2012). ...
The study explores the relation between participants’ level of self-criticism, self-reassurance, and eye gaze when looking at photographs of primary emotions. Participants completed The Forms of Self-Criticising/Attacking & Self-Reassuring Scale (FSCRS) and then a facial-emotion expression task while their eye movements were being recorded by an eye-tracker. The results indicate differences in people’s eye-gaze patterns when viewing facial-emotion expressions in relation to the level of self-criticism and self-reassurance. Specifically, participants with higher self-reassurance look more frequently at the eye region and less frequently at other facial areas and beyond the emotional faces. However, individuals with higher self-hatred look at the outside of the face more frequently than at the eyes area, and higher self-inadequacy predicted the individual would look more frequently at the eyes than at other facial areas. The results are important for understanding the role of self-criticism in relation to facial-emotion expressions and gazing, as self-criticism is a key underlying factor of all kinds of psychopathologies. Following further research, the results could be used to develop more objective diagnostics for self-criticism screening than the existing self-rating scales.
... Second, this temporal-course measure may help disentangle the abnormal attentional processes in different psychiatric disorders. It has been shown that people with social anxiety avoid looking at the eyes as well (Horley et al., 2003;Wang, Hu, Short, & Fu, 2012); however, they also show an initial vigilance (e.g., enhanced eye-looking time) followed by avoidance of social threat (e.g., reduced eyelooking time), which has been interpreted as evidence of a vigilantavoidant attentional bias (Boll et al., 2016;Wieser, Pauli, Weyers, et al., 2009). In contrast, in our study children with ASD did not show enhanced eye-looking time toward the threatening expressions. ...
Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exhibit a reduced duration of eye contact compared with typically developing (TD) individuals. This reduced eye contact has been theorized to be a strategy to relieve discomfort elicited by direct eye contact (Tanaka & Sung, 2016). Looking at threatening facial expressions may elicit more discomfort and consequently more eye avoidance in ASD individuals than looking at nonthreatening expressions. We explored whether eye avoidance in children with ASD is modulated by the social threat level of emotional expressions. In this study, 2- to 5-year-old children with and without ASD viewed faces with happy, angry, sad, and neutral expressions, while their eye movements were recorded. We observed the following: (a) when confronted with angry faces, the children with ASD fixated less on the eyes than did TD children, persistently across time; (b) the group differences in the overall eye-looking time were rarely found for happy, neutral, and sad faces; (c) the ASD group showed eye avoidance for neutral faces between 1,000 ms and 2,900 ms after the stimulus onset. Additionally, both groups spent more time looking at the angry faces than the faces showing other emotions. Considering that the children with ASD spent less time looking at the eyes of the angry faces than other emotional faces, the results suggest a combination of vigilance to threatening faces and an avoidance of the eyes in children with ASD. Our study not only extends the gaze aversion hypothesis but also has implications for the treatment and screening of ASD.
... On a related note, anxiety or fear of negative evaluation appeared to have an effect on gaze towards the eyes in a number of ET studies included in this review. Comorbid anxiety is common within ASD populations and atypical gaze to faces, particularly resulting in a reduction in fixation towards the eyes has been reported in anxiety disorders (Daly, 1978;Wang et al., 2012). Moreover, anxiety disorders when combined with ASD, have been shown to exacerbate ASD symptoms (Farrugia and Hudson, 2006). ...
... In addition to the variable diagnosis of ASD itself, ASD often presents with co-occurring diagnoses (Joshi et al., 2010). Social anxiety and ASD can present with similar symptomology, particularly in high functioning individuals (Tyson and Cruess, 2012) and anxiety may present with atypical gaze to faces (Daly, 1978;Wang et al., 2012). Approximately 30 percent of the ASD population have an ADHD diagnosis (Simonoff et al., 2008). ...
While behavioural difficulties in facial emotion recognition (FER) have been observed in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), behavioural studies alone are not suited to elucidate the specific nature of FER challenges in ASD. Eye tracking (ET) and electroencephalography (EEG) provide insights in to the attentional and neurological correlates of performance, and may therefore provide insight in to the mechanisms underpinning FER in ASD. Given that these processes develop over the course of the developmental trajectory, there is a need to synthesise findings in regard to the developmental stages to determine how the maturation of these systems may impact FER in ASD. We conducted a systematic review of fifty-four studies investigating ET or EEG meeting inclusion criteria. Findings indicate divergence of visual processing pathways in individuals with ASD. Altered function of the social brain in ASD impacts the processing of facial emotion across the developmental trajectory, resulting in observable differences in ET and EEG outcomes.
... In stark contrast to these reports, another eye-tracking study of the ORE [26] has reported that regardless of the race of the observer (East Asian or Caucasian), own-race faces elicited a relatively greater proportion of fixations to the eyes and hair, while other-race faces elicited a relatively greater proportion of fixations to the nose and mouth. Further, several other studies involving East Asian (Chinese or Japanese) participants viewing faces robustly show the "classical" T-shaped fixation pattern of fixations that, notably, almost exclusively demonstrate peak density over the eyes when spatial density or scatter plot analyses were utilized [28,29,32,[56][57][58][59] or show greater fixation over the eyes relative to the nose when area-normalized AOI analyses were utilized [60,61]. Other studies without area normalized AOIs are also at least suggestive of the same tendency for East Asian observers to principally fixate the eyes [25,[62][63][64]. ...
The Other-Race Effect (ORE) is the robust and well-established finding that people are generally poorer at facial recognition of individuals of another race than of their own race. Over the past four decades, much research has focused on the ORE because understanding this phenomenon is expected to elucidate fundamental face processing mechanisms and the influence of experience on such mechanisms. Several recent studies of the ORE in which the eye-movements of participants viewing own- and other-race faces were tracked have, however, reported highly conflicting results regarding the presence or absence of differential patterns of eye-movements to own- versus other-race faces. This discrepancy, of course, leads to conflicting theoretical interpretations of the perceptual basis for the ORE. Here we investigate fixation patterns to own- versus other-race (African and Chinese) faces for Caucasian participants using different analysis methods. While we detect statistically significant, though subtle, differences in fixation pattern using an Area of Interest (AOI) approach, we fail to detect significant differences when applying a spatial density map approach. Though there were no significant differences in the spatial density maps, the qualitative patterns matched the results from the AOI analyses reflecting how, in certain contexts, Area of Interest (AOI) analyses can be more sensitive in detecting the differential fixation patterns than spatial density analyses, due to spatial pooling of data with AOIs. AOI analyses, however, also come with the limitation of requiring a priori specification. These findings provide evidence that the conflicting reports in the prior literature may be at least partially accounted for by the differences in the statistical sensitivity associated with the different analysis methods employed across studies. Overall, our results suggest that detection of differences in eye-movement patterns can be analysis-dependent and rests on the assumptions inherent in the given analysis.
Although visual avoidance of faces is a hallmark feature of social anxiety disorder (SAD) on clinical and theoretical grounds, empirical support is equivocal. This review aims to clarify under which conditions socially anxious individuals display visual avoidance of faces. Through a systematic search in Web of Science and PubMed up to March 2019 we identified 61 publications that met the inclusion criteria. We discuss the influence of three factors on the extent to which socially anxious individuals avoid looking at faces: (a) severity of social anxiety symptoms (diagnosed SAD versus High Social Anxiety levels in community samples [HSA] or related characteristics [Shyness, Fear of Negative Evaluation]), (b) three types of social situation (computer facial-viewing tasks, speaking tasks, social interactions), and (c) development (age-group). Adults with SAD exhibit visual avoidance across all three types of social situations, whereas adults with HSA exhibit visual avoidance in speaking and interaction tasks but not in facial-viewing tasks. The relatively few studies with children and adolescents suggest that visual avoidance emerges during adolescence. The findings are discussed in the context of cognitive-behavioral and skills-deficit models. Suggestions for future research include the need for developmental studies and more fine-grained analyses of specific areas of the face.
