Studies indicate that people with social anxiety show changes in perception of facial emotion. Here we investigated the recognition of static and dynamic facial expressions in 2 groups varying with regard to scores on the Social Phobia Inventory (SPIN) and classified as having high social anxiety (HSA; SPIN Ն19; n ϭ 22) and low social anxiety (SPIN Ͻ19; n ϭ 21). Facial expressions of happiness, sadness, fear, and anger in dynamic (videos) and static (photos) conditions were presented at 4 intensities (25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%). For each condition, recognition means were analyzed with an ANOVA of model: 2 groups ϫ (2 conditions [static and dynamic] ϫ 4 emotions ϫ 4 intensities). We found an interaction between the factors Group, Condition, Emotion, and Intensity. Post hoc analysis indicated that the HSA group had better scores in the static face of anger with 25% of emotion compared with controls. No difference between groups was found in the dynamic condition. The analysis of the confusion matrix of judgments indicated that the advantage of the participants with social anxiety in the static condition was not explained by a general bias of attributing anger to facial expressions. The results suggest an advantage for individuals with social anxiety to recognize emotions in stimuli with less ecological validity (static faces). The use of dynamic faces may reduce or eliminate the differences between individuals with high and low social anxiety in the recognition of facial emotions.

Objective: To explore the temporal mechanism of attention in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and controls using a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task in which two letters (T1 and T2) were presented in close temporal proximity among distractors (attentional blink [AB]). Method: Thirty children aged between 9 and 13 years (12 with ADHD combined type and 18 controls) took part in the study. Both groups performed two kinds of RSVP task. In the single task, participants simply had to identify a target letter (T1), whereas in the dual task, they had to identify a target letter (T1) and a probe letter (T2). Results: The ADHD and control groups were equivalent in their single-task performance. However, in the dual-task condition, there were significant between-group differences in the rate of detection of the probe letter (T2) at lag + 1 and lag + 4. The ADHD group exhibited a larger overall AB compared with controls. Conclusion: Our findings provide support for a link between ADHD and attentional blink.

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