Research master thesis | Psychology (research) (MSc)
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Socially anxious individuals are known to avoid many forms of social interaction. Since understanding emotions is essential for smooth social interaction, alterations in emotion recognition were...Show moreSocially anxious individuals are known to avoid many forms of social interaction. Since understanding emotions is essential for smooth social interaction, alterations in emotion recognition were previously assumed as one potential reason for this avoidance. Furthermore, this altered emotion recognition might be mediated by altered facial mimicry. However, metacognitive perspectives became more popular in psychopathology and might also be related to confidence in emotions recognition. In this study, we aimed to differentiate between alterations in emotion recognition (behavioral model) and alterations in self-evaluation (metacognitive model) in high socially anxious individuals compared to low socially anxious individuals. Participants completed both a facial mimicry and emotion recognition task with the addition of a confidence rating to measure self-evaluation. We hypothesized that, according to the behavioral model, high socially anxious individuals show altered emotion recognition and facial mimicry performance. In contrast, according to our metacognitive model, there should be no differences in emotion recognition and facial mimicry performance between groups, but high socially anxious individuals should score lower on confidence. The current study found support for the metacognitive model, namely that social anxiety does not seem to affect the ability to recognize and mimic emotions accurately. However, high socially anxious individuals feel less confident about this ability than less socially anxious individuals. Thus, lowered confidence in socially anxious individuals might affect the fear for social situations and therefore play an important role in the avoidance of social interactions.Show less
