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

• We compare face discrimination in socially anxious and non-anxious participants.
• Anxious individuals discriminated angry and neutral bandpass-filtered faces faster.
• This advantage was most pronounced for LSF-images.
• Results show LSF face processing advantage in social anxiety.

Background and objectivesSocial 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.MethodsTo 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.ResultsAcross 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.LimitationsThe 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.ConclusionsOur results show that social anxiety is not characterized by deficits in judging emotions from HSF-information, but by advantages when processing LSF-information.