Thus, studying the emotional perception of a group of faces would allow us to understand important characteristics of social information processing in social anxiety. Furthermore, individuals with high social anxiety tend to evaluate the overall emotion of faces in the crowd more negatively than that of a single face 12. People often interact with more than one person on an everyday basis, and individuals experiencing social anxiety frequently report feeling anxious while interacting with a large group of people (e.g., presenting in front of a large audience) 11. In previous studies wherein participants were presented with a picture of an emotional face and asked to identify its emotional category or rate its emotional magnitude, people with high social anxiety perceived neutral or ambiguous facial expressions more negatively than those in the control group 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Since evaluations from others are often conveyed through and inferred from facial expressions, how individuals with social anxiety respond to others’ faces could provide insight into social information processing among these individuals. Interpretational bias has also been studied using pictures of emotional faces. In these studies, individuals with social anxiety tended to interpret social situations more negatively than those in the control group. Interpretational bias among people with social anxiety has been studied by examining how participants interpret a scenario about an ambiguous social situation 4, 5. The cognitive model of social anxiety suggests that social anxiety develops and is maintained by negative biases in social information processing 2, 3: individuals with high social anxiety have a bias-in selective attention, memory, and interpretation-toward negative stimuli or events. Social anxiety is the fear of being negatively evaluated by others in social settings 1. Thus, our results suggest that socially anxious individuals lack the bias toward positive emotion and are more sensitive to negative emotion than nonanxious individuals in perceiving the numerosity of facial expressions. Correlation analyses indicated that social anxiety was negatively associated with the parameters of the function (mean for bias and standard deviation for sensitivity r = − 0.34, p = 0.003 for mean r = − 0.23, p = 0.047 for standard deviation). Individuals with low social anxiety showed a bias toward positive faces ( t(17) = 2.44, p = 0.026), while those with high social anxiety did not ( t(17) = 1.87, p = 0.079). Bias and sensitivity in numerosity perception of emotions were estimated by fitting a psychometric function to participants’ responses. They were asked to judge which emotion-positive or negative-was more numerous in the crowd.
In each trial of the experiment, participants were presented with a group of 16 emotional faces, varying in the number of faces expressing positive and negative emotions. Seventy-five college students completed self-reported questionnaires-assessing social anxiety symptoms-and a numerosity comparison experiment. This study investigated the numerosity perception of emotional faces among individuals with high social anxiety. You can also find a range of materials for teaching using builder view.The cognitive model of social anxiety suggests an association between social anxiety and cognitive bias toward negative social information.
There are a number of tutorials on how to get started making experiments in builder on the PsychoPy Youtube channel as well as several written tutorials and Experiment Recipes.
Remember that PsychoJS is younger than PsychoPy ® - so remember to check the status of online options before making an experiment you plan to run online! The easiest way to host a study online from PsychoPy ® is through the Pavlovia ® platform, and PsychoPy ® builder has inbuilt integration to interact with this platform. PsychoPy ® builder view is writing you a python script “under the hood” of your experiment, but if you want to run an experiment online it can also compile a javascript version of your task using PsychoPy’s sister library PsychoJS. You can easily make an experiment to run online in a browser. Your experiment will be less likely to have bugs (experiments coded from scratch can very easily contain errors - even when made by the best of programmers!).
Why would we (a team of programmers) recommend using a GUI?: Making your experiments using the PsychoPy ® builder is the approach that we generally recommend.