# The effect of anxiety and its interplay with social cues when perceiving aggressive behaviours

## TL;DR

This study explores how anxiety and social cues influence the perception of aggressive behaviors in ambiguous situations.

## Contribution

The study introduces a novel approach to understanding how anxiety interacts with social cues in perceiving aggression.

## Key findings

- Threat of shock did not affect sensitivity or decision criteria for detecting aggression.
- Participants showed quicker evidence accumulation under threat conditions.
- Anxiety was associated with increased attention to threat-related social cues.

## Abstract

Contextual cues and emotional states carry expectations and biases that are used to attribute meaning to what we see. In addition, emotional states, such as anxiety, shape our visual systems, increasing overall, and particularly threat-related, sensitivity. It remains unclear, however, how anxiety interacts with additional cues when categorising sensory input. This is especially important in social scenarios where ambiguous gestures are commonplace, thus requiring the integration of cues for a proper interpretation. To this end, we decided to assess how states of anxiety might bias the perception of potentially aggressive social interactions, and how external cues are incorporated in this process. Participants (N = 71) were tasked with signalling the presence of aggression in ambiguous social interactions. Simultaneously, an observer (facial expression) reacted (by showing an emotional expression) to this interaction. Importantly, participants performed this task under safety and threat of shock conditions. Decision measures and eye-tracking data were collected. Our results showed that threat of shock did not affect sensitivity nor criterion when detecting aggressive interactions. The same pattern was observed for response times. Drift diffusion modelling analysis, however, suggested quicker evidence accumulation when under threat. Finally, dwell times over the observer were higher when under threat, indicating a possible association between anxiety states and a bias towards potentially threat-related indicators. Future probing into this topic remains a necessity to better explain the current findings.