High trait anxiety enhances optimal integration of auditory and visual threat cues

Heffer, Naomi; Gradidge, Molly; Karl, Anke; Ashwin, Chris; Petrini, Karin

Abstract

Background
Emotion perception is essential to human interaction and relies on effective integration of emotional cues across sensory modalities. Despite initial evidence for anxiety-related biases in multisensory processing of emotional information, there is no research to date that directly addresses whether the mechanism of multisensory integration is altered by anxiety. Here, we compared audiovisual integration of emotional cues between individuals with low vs. high trait anxiety.
Methods
Participants were 62 young adults who were assessed on their ability to quickly and accurately identify happy, angry and sad emotions from dynamic visual-only, audio-only and audiovisual face and voice displays.
Results
The results revealed that individuals in the high anxiety group were more likely to integrate angry faces and voices in a statistically optimal fashion, as predicted by the Maximum Likelihood Estimation model, compared to low anxiety individuals. This means that high anxiety individuals achieved higher precision in correctly recognising anger from angry audiovisual stimuli compared to angry face or voice-only stimuli, and compared to low anxiety individuals.
Limitations
We tested a higher proportion of females, and although this does reflect the higher prevalence of clinical anxiety among females in the general population, potential sex differences in multisensory mechanisms due to anxiety should be examined in future studies.
Conclusions
Individuals with high trait anxiety have multisensory mechanisms that are especially fine-tuned for processing threat-related emotions. This bias may exhaust capacity for processing of other emotional stimuli and lead to overly negative evaluations of social interactions.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Sep 14, 2021
• Online Publication Date: Sep 15, 2021
• Publication Date: Mar 31, 2024
• Deposit Date: Jan 10, 2025
• Journal: Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry
• Print ISSN: 0005-7916
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 74
• Article Number: 101693
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbtep.2021.101693
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/13608382
• Additional Information: This article is maintained by: Elsevier; Article Title: High trait anxiety enhances optimal integration of auditory and visual threat cues; Journal Title: Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry; CrossRef DOI link to publisher maintained version: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbtep.2021.101693; Content Type: article; Copyright: © 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.