The effect of anxiety biases on multisensory perception of emotions

Abstract

Effective integration and perception of emotional signals from various sensory modalities are crucial for human interaction. Although there is some preliminary evidence suggesting that anxiety may induce biases in emotion perception, just how anxiety may relate to the broader problem of multisensory integration is unclear. In this study, 63 healthy Asian adults were required to judge audiovisual social stimuli under four conditions: dynamic visual-only, auditory-only, audiovisual congruent (e.g., happy face and happy voice), and audiovisual incongruent (e.g., happy face and angry voice). Participants had to determine whether the stimuli, on the whole, were positive or negative to varying degrees, as quickly as possible. The results revealed that individuals with higher anxiety tended to judge stimuli to be more negative along with exhibiting longer response times when interpreting social emotional cues across different modalities. Specifically, when integrating facial expressions and voices that displayed conflicting emotions, participants with heightened anxiety levels were more likely to perceive negative emotions even when positive emotional cues were presented simultaneously. These findings suggest that anxiety can have distorted emotion interpretation in multisensory processing, potentially leading to difficulties in social interactions by excessively focusing on negative emotional cues in daily life.