Anna Himes | Trait Anxiety and Assessment of Ambiguous Emotions

The purpose of the current study is to examine whether trait anxiety affects participants’ ability to recognize facial emotions. Past research has supported the notion that high levels of anxiety may result in an inaccurate recognition of emotion. Specifically, possibly through mechanisms such as the Facial Feedback Hypothesis and Embodied Emotion Simulation, past research has supported the notion that individuals with anxiety are more likely to misclassify nonthreatening emotions as threatening. However, there has yet to be a robust set of studies that observe this relationship with the added factor of ambiguity created by surgical masks. In this study, college students completed a trait anxiety measure and emotion-recognition task consisting of 56 photographs of Black and White males and females who were expressing anger, fear, disgust, happiness, calm, sadness, or neutrality. Half of the photographs included surgical masks covering the bottom half of the person’s face. Three hypotheses were tested: Participants with higher trait anxiety will be less accurate at identifying masked and unmasked emotions than participants with lower trait anxiety overall; Participants with high trait anxiety will misclassify non-threatening masked and unmasked emotions (happy, calm, neutral) as threatening emotions (anger, disgust, fear) more often than participants with low trait-anxiety; and participants with high and with low trait anxiety will perform more accurately in assessing unmasked emotions than in assessing masked emotions.

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Kristin Ritchey

Department of Psychological Sciences

Undergraduate 

Honors College