Social Anxiety and Anger Identification Bubbles Reveal Differential Use of Facial Information With Low Spatial Frequencies

We investigated the facial information that socially anxious and nonanxious individuals utilize to judge emotions. Using a reversed-correlation technique, we presented participants with face images that were masked with random bubble patterns. These patterns determined which parts of the face were visible in specific spatial-frequency bands. This masking allowed us to establish which locations and spatial frequencies were helping participants to successfully discriminate angry faces from neutral ones. Although socially anxious individuals performed as well as nonanxious individuals on the emotion-discrimination task, they did not utilize the same facial information for the task. The fine details (high spatial frequencies) around the eyes were discriminative for both groups, but only socially anxious participants additionally processed rough configural information (low spatial frequencies).