The relationship between social anxiety and the perception of depth-ambiguous biological motion stimuli is mediated by inhibitory ability
Abstract
Orthographically projected biological motion stimuli are depth-ambiguous. Consequently, their projection when oriented towards the viewer is the same as when oriented away. Despite this, observers tend to interpret such stimuli as facing the viewer more often. Some have speculated that this facing-the-viewer bias may exist for sociobiological reasons: Mistaking another human as retreating when they are actually approaching could have more severe consequences than the opposite error. An implication of this theory is that the facing-towards percept may be perceived as more threatening than the facing-away percept. Given this, as well as the finding that anxious individuals have been found to display an attentional bias towards threatening stimuli, we reasoned that more anxious individuals might have stronger facing-the-viewer biases. Furthermore, since anxious individuals have been found to perform poorer on inhibition tasks, we hypothesized that inhibitory ability would mediate the relationship between anxiety and the facing-the-viewer bias (i.e., difficulty inhibiting the threatening percept). Exploring individual differences, we asked participants to complete anxiety questionnaires, to perform a Go/No-Go task, and then to comp...Continue Reading
References
Development and validation of measures of social phobia scrutiny fear and social interaction anxiety
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