The relationship between social anxiety and the perception of depth-ambiguous biological motion stimuli is mediated by inhibitory ability

Heenan, Adam; Troje, Nikolaus F.

doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2015.02.012

Cited by 17 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 60 publications

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“…The difference in the magnitude of bias for upright and inverted stimuli could also reflect the contribution of social relevance to the strength of the FTV bias for upright figures, as was proposed by Vanrie et al. (2004) and later supported by Heenan and Troje ( 2014 , 2015 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 71%

“…Figures that appear to be human might be perceived as facing-the-viewer more often due to a desire to prepare oneself for situations that require social interaction or to deal with a threatening situation (e.g., the figure is approaching in order to attack the observer). Support for this theory emerged from a study where FTV bias was reduced after undergoing muscle relaxation and physical exercise ( Heenan & Troje, 2014 , 2015 ). The decrease in social anxiety that arose from these techniques was believed to mediate this reduction in FTV bias.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Inverting the Facing-the-Viewer Bias for Biological Motion Stimuli

Weech

Troje

2018

i-Perception

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Depth-ambiguous point-light walkers are most frequently seen as facing-the-viewer (FTV). It has been argued that the FTV bias depends on recognising the stimulus as a person. Accordingly, reducing the social relevance of biological motion by presenting stimuli upside down has been shown to reduce FTV bias. Here, we replicated the experiment that reported this finding and added stick figure walkers to the task in order to assess the effect of explicit shape information on facing bias for inverted figures. We measured the FTV bias for upright and inverted stick figure walkers and point-light walkers presented in different azimuth orientations. Inversion of the stimuli did not reduce facing direction judgements to chance levels. In fact, we observed a significant facing away bias in the inverted stimulus conditions. In addition, we found no difference in the pattern of data between stick figure and point-light walkers. Although the results are broadly consistent with previous findings, we do not conclude that inverting biological motion simply negates the FTV bias; rather, inversion causes stimuli to be seen facing away from the viewer more often than not. The results support the interpretation that primarily low-level visual processes are responsible for the biases produced by both upright and inverted stimuli.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 71%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Inverting the Facing-the-Viewer Bias for Biological Motion Stimuli

Weech

Troje

2018

i-Perception

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“…The second main conclusion of the current review is the fact that specific social cognitive biases that have previously been observed using other methods (e.g., mood-congruent bias in MDD, Loi et al, 2013 ; Kaletsch et al, 2014b ), increased threat perception in individuals with elevated anxiety (Heenan and Troje, 2015 ), aberrant body size perception in eating disorders (Vocks et al, 2007 ; Phillipou et al, 2016 ) can also be found in studies using PLDs. Thus, even though the information presented in PLDs is extremely limited, the stimuli are sufficient to elicit disorder-specific, social cognitive biases.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 82%

“…Interestingly, the opposite bias (interpreting the walker as facing away from the observer) was observed in individuals with high levels of social anxiety, which can be interpreted in terms of “wishful seeing” and protecting oneself (Van de Cruys et al, 2013 ). Facing-the-viewer bias has also been found to be mediated by inhibitory abilities in individuals with high social anxiety (Heenan and Troje, 2015 ).…”

Section: Anxiety Disordersmentioning

confidence: 99%

It Is Not Just in Faces! Processing of Emotion and Intention from Biological Motion in Psychiatric Disorders

Okruszek

2018

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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Social neuroscience offers a wide range of techniques that may be applied to study the social cognitive deficits that may underlie reduced social functioning—a common feature across many psychiatric disorders. At the same time, a significant proportion of research in this area has been conducted using paradigms that utilize static displays of faces or eyes. The use of point-light displays (PLDs) offers a viable alternative for studying recognition of emotion or intention inference while minimizing the amount of information presented to participants. This mini-review aims to summarize studies that have used PLD to study emotion and intention processing in schizophrenia (SCZ), affective disorders, anxiety and personality disorders, eating disorders and neurodegenerative disorders. Two main conclusions can be drawn from the reviewed studies: first, the social cognitive problems found in most of the psychiatric samples using PLD were of smaller magnitude than those found in studies presenting social information using faces or voices. Second, even though the information presented in PLDs is extremely limited, presentation of these types of stimuli is sufficient to elicit the disorder-specific, social cognitive biases (e.g., mood-congruent bias in depression, increased threat perception in anxious individuals, aberrant body size perception in eating disorders) documented using other methodologies. Taken together, these findings suggest that point-light stimuli may be a useful method of studying social information processing in psychiatry. At the same time, some limitations of using this methodology are also outlined.

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“…Gender specificity of the link between BM processing and visual social cognition may be of value for better understanding a wide range of psychiatric, neurologic, neurodevelopmental, and psychosomatic conditions. Some aspects of BM processing are atypical in ASD (e.g., Klin et al, 2009;Nackaerts et al, 2012;Jack et al, 2017), schizophrenia (e.g., Kim et al, 2011;Hastings et al, 2013;Spencer et al, 2013;Hashimoto et al, 2014;Vaskinn et al, 2016Vaskinn et al, , 2018Engelstad et al, 2017Engelstad et al, , 2018aOkruszek et al, 2018) and schizotypal personality disorder (Hur et al, 2016), bipolar disorders , attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) (Kröger et al, 2014), anxiety disorders and in individuals with elevated anxiety (van de Cruys et al, 2013;Heenan and Troje, 2015), obsessive compulsive disorders (Kim et al, 2008), and unipolar depression (Loi et al, 2013;Kaletsch et al, 2014). Deficits are also reported in individuals who were born preterm and suffer congenital brain lesions ), Alzheimer's (Henry et al, 2012;Insch et al, 2015) and Parkinson's diseases (Cao et al, 2015;Jaywant et al, 2016a,b;Kloeters et al, 2017), epilepsy (Bala et al, 2018), and eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia (Zucker et al, 2013;Lang et al, 2015;Dapelo et al, 2017).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Untangling the Ties Between Social Cognition and Body Motion: Gender Impact

et al. 2020

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We proved the viability of the general hypothesis that biological motion (BM) processing serves as a hallmark of social cognition. We assumed that BM processing and inferring emotions through BM (body language reading) are firmly linked and examined whether this tie is gender-specific. Healthy females and males completed two tasks with the same set of point-light BM displays portraying angry and neutral locomotion of female and male actors. For one task, perceivers had to indicate actor gender, while for the other, they had to infer the emotional content of locomotion. Thus, with identical visual input, we directed task demands either to BM processing or inferring of emotion. This design allows straight comparison between sensitivity to BM and recognition of emotions conveyed by the same BM. In addition, perceivers were administered a set of photographs from the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET), with which they identified either emotional state or actor gender. Although there were no gender differences in performance on BM tasks, a tight link occurred between recognition accuracy of emotions and gender through BM in males. In females only, body language reading (both accuracy and response time) was associated with performance on the RMET. The outcome underscores gender-specific modes in visual social cognition and triggers investigation of body language reading in a wide range of neuropsychiatric disorders.

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The relationship between social anxiety and the perception of depth-ambiguous biological motion stimuli is mediated by inhibitory ability

Cited by 17 publications

References 60 publications

Inverting the Facing-the-Viewer Bias for Biological Motion Stimuli

Inverting the Facing-the-Viewer Bias for Biological Motion Stimuli

It Is Not Just in Faces! Processing of Emotion and Intention from Biological Motion in Psychiatric Disorders

Untangling the Ties Between Social Cognition and Body Motion: Gender Impact

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