Faces Of The Emotional Impact Avoidance Behavior: Regulation Of Social Anxiety And Gaze Direction

Aims:A lot of work has been done in how we process these facial signals and how we recognize the emotional meaning. Recently, it is also highly important to objectify how the perceiver of an emotional display responds behaviorally. The latest behavior data reveal that subjects were faster in moving a positive face toward themself and moving a negative face away.The understanding of facial expressions is not only influenced by the category of expressions, but other factors such as social phobia and gaze directions. The aim of Study1was to examine whether emotion and social anxiety affect approach/avoidance behavior. Then under the guidance of the result, a further study was conducted. Because of the importance of gaze direction in emotional face detection, how emotion, social anxiety and gaze directions influencs behavior tendency was examined in Study2.Methods:Subjects were asked to make whole-body forward (approach) or backward (avoidance) steps on a force plate in response to angry, sad, happy or fear faces.Results:In Study1,there was a significant interaction between emotion types and behavioral directions in the pair of anger and sad faces. It was significantly faster to approach anger faces than sadness; but when avoidancing, the difference was not significant. In the group of happy and fear faces, a significant interaction between emotion, behavioral directions and the level of anxiety was found. Ralated to fear faces, the low social anxiety group was faster to approach happy faces. But in high social anxiety group, there was no interaction. Morever, when approaching happy faces, the low social anxiety group was faster than the high social anxiety group while slower than the high group when avoiding. Besides, it was faster to avoid fear faces than happy faces for the low social anxiety group, but there was no difference for the high group.In Study2, there was a significant interaction between emotion types and gaze directions in the pair of anger and sad faces. Specifically, the raction time was faster when sad faces was coupled with direct gaze than averted gaze. But for angry faces there was no difference in gaze directions. The results also revealed a significant3-way interaction of group×emotion×gaze in anger and sadness group. For the high social anxiety group, a significant interaction between emotion and gaze directions was revealed. The reaction time to angry faces was not effected by gaze directions but for sad faces with direct gaze was faster than averted gaze. For the low social anxiety group there was a main effect of gaze directions, which showed that the raction time was faster when faces is coupled with direct gaze than averted gaze. In happy and fear faces group, the reaction time was faster when happy faces coupled with direct gaze and fear faces coupled with averted gaze. To approach happy faces was faster than to fear faces while to avoid fear faces was faster than to avoid happy faces.Conclusion:As a novel version of the approach-avoidance task, the whole-body stepping movements can be a index to examine the motive of approach/avoidance. The approach/avoidance behaior is effected by social anxiety. Compared to low social anxiety, people with high social anxiety have stronger avoidance tendence, inciading to avoid the face which means communication. As a index of communication, gaze not only effects the sensitivity of persiver to faces, but also influences the reaction time to faces.