To which world regions does the valence–dominance model of social perception apply?

Over the past 10 years, Oosterhof and Todorov’s valence–dominance model has emerged as the most prominent account of how people evaluate faces on social dimensions. In this model, two dimensions (valence and dominance) underpin social judgements of faces. Because this model has primarily been developed and tested in Western regions, it is unclear whether these findings apply to other regions. We addressed this question by replicating Oosterhof and Todorov’s methodology across 11 world regions, 41 countries and 11,570 participants. When we used Oosterhof and Todorov’s original analysis strategy, the valence–dominance model generalized across regions. When we used an alternative methodology to allow for correlated dimensions, we observed much less generalization. Collectively, these results suggest that, while the valence–dominance model generalizes very well across regions when dimensions are forced to be orthogonal, regional differences are revealed when we use different extraction methods and correlate and rotate the dimension reduction solution

A multi-country test of brief reappraisal interventions on emotions during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased negative emotions and decreased positive emotions globally. Left unchecked, these emotional changes might have a wide array of adverse impacts. To reduce negative emotions and increase positive emotions, we tested the effectiveness of reappraisal, an emotion-regulation strategy that modifies how one thinks about a situation. Participants from 87 countries and regions (n = 21,644) were randomly assigned to one of two brief reappraisal interventions (reconstrual or repurposing) or one of two control conditions (active or passive). Results revealed that both reappraisal interventions (vesus both control conditions) consistently reduced negative emotions and increased positive emotions across different measures. Reconstrual and repurposing interventions had similar effects. Importantly, planned exploratory analyses indicated that reappraisal interventions did not reduce intentions to practice preventive health behaviours. The findings demonstrate the viability of creating scalable, low-cost interventions for use around the world

Involuntary processing of social dominance cues from bimodal face-voice displays

Social-rank cues communicate social status or social power within and between groups. Information about social-rank is fluently processed in both visual and auditory modalities. So far, the investigation on the processing of social-rank cues has been limited to studies in which information from a single modality was assessed or manipulated. Yet, in everyday communication, multiple information channels are used to express and understand social-rank. We sought to examine the (in)voluntary nature of processing of facial and vocal signals of social-rank using a cross-modal Stroop task. In two experiments, participants were presented with face-voice pairs that were either congruent or incongruent in social-rank (i.e. social dominance). Participants’ task was to label face social dominance while ignoring the voice, or label voice social dominance while ignoring the face. In both experiments, we found that face-voice incongruent stimuli were processed more slowly and less accurately than were the congruent stimuli in the face-attend and the voice-attend tasks, exhibiting classical Stroop-like effects. These findings are consistent with the functioning of a social-rank bio-behavioural system which consistently and automatically monitors one’s social standing in relation to others and uses that information to guide behaviour

The temporal unfolding of face processing in social anxiety disorder — a MEG study

The current study is the first to use magnetoencephalography (MEG) to examine how individuals with social anxiety disorder (SAD) process emotional facial expressions (EFEs). We expected that, compared to healthy controls (HCs), participants with SAD will show an early (200 ms post-stimulus) over-activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). Individuals with SAD (n = 12) and healthy controls (HCs, n = 12) were presented with photographs of facial displays during MEG recording. As compared to the HC group, the SAD group showed a reduced M170 (right FG under-activation around 130–200 ms); early reduced activation in the right insula, and lower insular sensitivity to the type of EFE displayed. In addition, the SAD group showed a late over-activation in the right DLPFC. This unique EFE processing pattern in SAD suggests an early under-activation of cortical areas, possibly related to reduced emphasis on high spatial frequency information and greater early emphasis on low spatial frequency information. The late DLPFC over-activation in the SAD group may correlate to failures of cognitive control in this disorder. The importance of a temporal perspective for the understanding of facial processing in psychopathology is underlined

Selective attention to emotional prosody in social anxiety: a dichotic listening study

The majority of evidence on social anxiety (SA)-linked attentional biases to threat comes from research using facial expressions. Emotions are, however, communicated through other channels, such as voice. Despite its importance in the interpretation of social cues, emotional prosody processing in SA has been barely explored. This study investigated whether SA is associated with enhanced processing of task-irrelevant angry prosody. Fifty-three participants with high and low SA performed a dichotic listening task in which pairs of male/female voices were presented, one to each ear, with either the same or different prosody (neutral or angry). Participants were instructed to focus on either the left or right ear and to identify the speaker’s gender in the attended side. Our main results show that, once attended, task-irrelevant angry prosody elicits greater interference than does neutral prosody. Surprisingly, high socially anxious participants were less prone to distraction from attended-angry (compared to attended-neutral) prosody than were low socially anxious individuals. These findings emphasise the importance of examining SA-related biases across modalities

Social anxiety biases the evaluation of facial displays: Evidence from single face and multi-facial stimuli

This study examined the contribution of social anxiety to the evaluation of emotional facial stimuli, while controlling for the gender of participants and stimuli. Participants (n=63) completed two tasks: a single face evaluation task in which they had to evaluate angry versus neutral faces and, a facial crowd evaluation task in which they had to evaluate displays with a varying number of neutral and angry faces. In each task, participants had to evaluate the stimuli with respect to (a) the degree of disapproval expressed by the single face/crowd, and (b) the perceived difficulty of interacting with the face/crowd (emotional cost). Consistent with earlier studies, results showed that social anxiety modulated the evaluation of single faces for emotional cost, but not for disapproval ratings. In contrast, the evaluation of facial crowds was modulated by social anxiety on both ratings. © 2012 Copyright Psychology Press Ltd

Being “in” or “out” of the game: subjective and acoustic reactions to exclusion and popularity in social anxiety

Social Anxiety (SA) has been shown to be associated with compensatory deficits in pro-social behavior following exclusion and with failure to capitalize on social success. We assessed the subjective and expressive responses of high (n=48) and low (n=56) socially anxious individuals to exclusion, acceptance, and popularity induced by a participation in an online ball-tossing task. Before the manipulation, participants read aloud neutral and command utterances. Following the manipulation, participants rated their mood and cognitions and re-read the utterances. Acoustic properties (fundamental frequency–mF0, intensity, speaking rate) of these utterances were analyzed. We found greater differences in self-esteem between high and low socially anxious individuals following the exclusion condition, as compared to the acceptance condition. Among low socially anxious individuals, exclusion promoted increased vocal confidence, as indicated by decreased mF0 and increased vocal intensity in uttering commands; High socially anxious individuals exhibited an opposite reaction, responding to exclusion by decreased vocal confidence. Following popularity, high SA was associated with decreased enhancement in mood and self-esteem in women but not in men. Consistent with evolutionary and interpersonal accounts of SA, we highlight the importance of examining the effects of SA and gender on events indicating unambiguous and unanimous social acceptance. Examining reactivity to changes in belongingness may have important implications for understanding the core mechanisms of SA