中国科学院心理研究所机构知识库

(1) Background: While anxiety disorders are becoming more prevalent in our society, anxiety diagnosis still traditionally requires filling out assessments or requires professional consultation and evaluation, but now we could perform a simple and quick screening using electronic equipment based on distinct indicators of anxious individuals. It is known that individuals suffering from anxiety disorders and anxious states exhibit attentional biases, particularly when viewing emotional faces, a tendency to perceive negative expressions first, and prolonged gaze durations. Hence, this article would examine the gaze characteristics of anxious people toward various negative faces in detail and would develop preliminary indicators for quick screening. (2) Method: A hospital sample of 28 anxious patients and a community sample of 23 healthy individuals were shown pairs of happy-negative and neutral-negative faces. Negative emotions include five emotions: anger, disgust, fear, sadness, and surprise. Using eye tracker to collect data in free viewing task. Multi-factor ANOVA (Analysis of Variance) test and multiple pairwise comparison Tukey's HSD test were used to examine attention bias of anxious individuals toward negative emotions. (3) Results: anxious group would tend to pay more attention on figures with negative emotions compared with neutral and positive emotions, on the contrary healthy group would take longer time on neutral and positive ones. Meanwhile this bias effect between anxious and healthy group exhibits more evidently in the case when fear and positive emotion figures appearing in pair. (4) Conclusions: This study confirms the significant differences in attentional bias for negative facial emotions between anxious and healthy individuals and provides more clear and specific characteristics for both populations' attentional features, offering indicators for future development in the eHealthcare industry.