Les biais de jugement des expressions faciales émotionnelles dans l'anxiété sociale : l'influence de l'ambigüité des stimuli
(2012)
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- (en) Social anxiety (SA) is a common and incapacitating disorder that has been associated with seriously impaired academic, professional, and general social functioning. Cognitive models of SA posit that biased cognitions contribute to the development and maintenance of the disorder (e.g., Clark & Wells, 1995; Rapee & Heimberg, 1997). Over the last decades, a large body of research has provided evidence that individuals suffering from SA exhibit such biased cognitions at different levels: in visual attention, in memory and interpretation of social events, and in judgment of social cues. It has been shown that when socially anxious individuals (SAs) are presented with text vignettes describing social situations, they tend to interpret ambiguous social scenarios negatively and to catastrophize slightly negative scenarios (e.g., Amir, Foa, & Coles, 1998; Stopa & Clark, 2000). However, the effect of SA on the interpretation of threatening facial expressions, rather than scenarios, remains a puzzle. Indeed, the majority of studies suggest that SAs, despite their attentional bias for threatening faces, do not exhibit an explicit interpretation bias for emotional faces (Douilliez & Philippot, 2003; Merckelbach, Vanhout, Vandenhout, & Mersch, 1989; Philippot & Douilliez, 2005). In the present dissertation, we hypothesized that the discrepancy between the results of studies using verbal versus non-verbal material may be due to the relative ambiguity of the stimuli used. Indeed, text vignettes are more likely to be complex or ambiguous, allowing for interpretation biases. By way of contrast, emotional faces appear to be less ambiguous stimuli. Moreover, studies about interpretation bias in SA have mostly used single-faces presentations of unambiguous, well-identified emotional displays (e.g., Philippot & Douilliez, 2005), leaving little room for interpretation. In this thesis, we manipulated ambiguity by using different types of non-verbal emotional facial expressions: identification of less intense stimuli (morphed stimuli), interpretation of multiple faces either simultaneously (crowds) or sequentially (sequences of different emotional facial expressions), interpretation of blurred stimuli and effect of familiarity on interpretation. We focused on two particular interpretation biases, namely evaluation of approbation and evaluation of the emotional cost entailed by a social interaction. Results show that SAs reported a higher emotional cost than NACs for interacting, wherever the stimuli were ambiguous or not. Moreover, SAs overestimated the disapprobation conveyed by emotional facial expressions, but exclusively when the stimuli were ambiguous. Interpretive bias in social anxiety with non-verbal materiel seems thus confirmed. Theses findings emphasize the importance of refining the cognitive models of SA and to propose to patients new types of interventions.
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Vanhaelen, M. (2012). Les biais de jugement des expressions faciales émotionnelles dans l’anxiété sociale : l’influence de l’ambigüité des stimuli. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/39825