# Biases in Perceiving Positive Versus Negative Emotions: The Influence of Social Anxiety and State Affect

## TL;DR

People with high social anxiety tend to perceive negative emotions more strongly, and this bias is influenced by their current mood.

## Contribution

The study reveals how social anxiety and current mood interact to influence emotional perception biases.

## Key findings

- High social anxiety is associated with a stronger negative perceptual bias.
- State affect modifies the relationship between social anxiety and perceptual bias.
- Low social anxiety individuals may show compensatory effects against negative mood.

## Abstract

Models suggest social anxiety is characterized by negative processing biases. Negative biases also arise from negative mood, i.e., state affect. We examined how social anxiety influences emotional processing and whether state affect, or mood, modified the relationship between social anxiety and perceptual bias. We quantified bias by determining the point of subjective equality, PSE, the face judged equally often as happy and as angry. We found perceptual bias depended on social anxiety and state affect. PSE was greater in individuals high (mean PSE: 8.69) versus low (mean PSE: 3.04) in social anxiety. The higher PSE indicated a stronger negative bias in high social anxiety. State affect modified this relationship, with high social anxiety associated with stronger negative biases, but only for individuals with greater negative affect. State affect and trait anxiety interacted such that social anxiety status alone was insufficient to fully characterize perceptual biases. This raises several issues such as the need to consider what constitutes an appropriate control group and the need to consider state affect in social anxiety. Importantly, our results suggest compensatory effects may counteract the influences of negative mood in individuals low in social anxiety.