Oliver Langner

Presentation and validation of the Radboud Faces Database

Many research fields concerned with the processing of information contained in human faces would benefit from face stimulus sets in which specific facial characteristics are systematically varied while other important picture characteristics are kept constant. Specifically, a face database in which displayed expressions, gaze direction, and head orientation are parametrically varied in a complete factorial design would be highly useful in many research domains. Furthermore, these stimuli should be standardised in several important, technical aspects. The present article presents the freely available Radboud Faces Database offering such a stimulus set, containing both Caucasian adult and children images. This face database is described both procedurally and in terms of content, and a validation study concerning its most important characteristics is presented. In the validation study, all frontal images were rated with respect to the shown facial expression, intensity of expression, clarity of expression, genuineness of expression, attractiveness, and valence. The results show very high recognition of the intended facial expressions.

Social Anxiety and Anger Identification Bubbles Reveal Differential Use of Facial Information With Low Spatial Frequencies

We investigated the facial information that socially anxious and nonanxious individuals utilize to judge emotions. Using a reversed-correlation technique, we presented participants with face images that were masked with random bubble patterns. These patterns determined which parts of the face were visible in specific spatial-frequency bands. This masking allowed us to establish which locations and spatial frequencies were helping participants to successfully discriminate angry faces from neutral ones. Although socially anxious individuals performed as well as nonanxious individuals on the emotion-discrimination task, they did not utilize the same facial information for the task. The fine details (high spatial frequencies) around the eyes were discriminative for both groups, but only socially anxious participants additionally processed rough configural information (low spatial frequencies).

Face value: Eye movements and the evaluation of facial crowds in social anxiety

Scientific evidence is equivocal on whether Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is characterized by a biased negative evaluation of (grouped) facial expressions, even though it is assumed that such a bias plays a crucial role in the maintenance of the disorder. To shed light on the underlying mechanisms of face evaluation in social anxiety, the eye movements of 22 highly socially anxious (SAs) and 21 non-anxious controls (NACs) were recorded while they rated the degree of friendliness of neutral-angry and smiling-angry face combinations. While the Crowd Rating Task data showed no significant differences between SAs and NACs, the resultant eye-movement patterns revealed that SAs, compared to NACs, looked away faster when the face first fixated was angry. Additionally, in SAs the proportion of fixated angry faces was significantly higher than for other expressions. Independent of social anxiety, these fixated angry faces were the best predictor of subsequent affect ratings for either group. Angry faces influence attentional processes such as eye movements in SAs and by doing so reflect biased evaluations. As these processes do not correlate with explicit ratings of faces, however, it remains unclear at what point implicit attentional behaviors lead to anxiety-prone behaviors and the maintenance of SAD. The relevance of these findings is discussed in the light of the current theories.

Faking on direct, indirect, and behavioural measures of spider fear: Can you get away with it?

We tested direct, indirect, and behavioural measures of fear of spiders under neutral instructions, and when participants were asked to fake high and low fear of spiders. Our findings indicate that the Approach Avoidance Task (AAT) was the only measure that could be faked in one of the faking conditions only. We also assessed how easily faked results could be detected on each measure for different diagnostic criteria. The direct and behavioural measures showed good performance for all criteria. The AAT performed comparably only for a conservative criterion, when detecting fakers is less important than correctly labelling non-fakers.

Socially anxious individuals discriminate better between angry and neutral faces, particularly when using low spatial frequency information

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Social anxiety is associated with biased processing of threatening faces. Earlier research indicated that socially anxious individuals are biased towards processing low spatial frequency (LSF) information when judging facial expressions. However, it remains unclear whether this bias reflects better performance for LSF-information, worse performance for high spatial frequency (HSF) information that needs to be compensated for, or both. METHODS To answer this question, we used frequency-filtered neutral and angry face stimuli in a speeded classification task to compare the performance of socially anxious and non-anxious individuals for different spatial frequency bands. RESULTS Across all spatial frequency bands, socially anxious individuals were faster in judging facial expressions. Importantly, this performance advantage was larger for LSF-filtered stimuli and most pronounced for those stimuli with the lowest frequency band. Analyzing inverse efficiency scores showed the same pattern, ruling out speed-accuracy trade-off differences between groups. LIMITATIONS The study uses rather artificial (bandpass-filtered) stimuli and is limited towards contrasting the discrimination of neutral and angry faces. Further, only participants with subclinical anxiety were part of the study, so clinical relevance remains to be shown. CONCLUSIONS Our results show that social anxiety is not characterized by deficits in judging emotions from HSF-information, but by advantages when processing LSF-information.

Task-irrelevant spider associations affect categorization performance

In two studies, the Single Target Implicit Association Test (STIAT) was used to investigate automatic associations toward spiders. In both experiments, we measured the strength of associations between pictures of spiders and either threat-related words or pleasant words. Unlike previous studies, we administered a STIAT version in which stimulus contents was task-irrelevant: The target spider pictures were categorized according to the label picture, irrespective of what they showed. In Study 1, spider-fearful individuals versus non-fearful controls were tested, Study 2 compared spider enthusiasts to non-fearful controls. Results revealed that the novel STIAT version was sensitive to group differences in automatic associations toward spiders. In Study 1, it successfully distinguished between spider-fearful individuals and non-fearful controls. Moreover, STIAT scores predicted automatic fear responses best, whereas controlled avoidance behavior was best predicted by the FAS (German translation of the Fear of Spiders Questionnaire). The results of Study 2 demonstrated that the novel STIAT version was also able to differentiate between spider enthusiasts and non-fearful controls.