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Effect of anxiety or depression levels on perceptual thresholds and sensitivity in detecting facial emotions in elementary school students

Abstract

This study investigated differences in elementary school children's perceptual thresholds to detect positive and negative emotions in facial expressions, and explored differences in perceptual sensitivity by changes of emotional intensity based on their anxiety and depression levels. Participants were elementary school students in grades 4 through 6. The students' anxiety and depression levels were estimated using the Revised Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale (n = 236) and the Children's Depression Inventory (n = 216). We divided our sample into an “elevated” group (1 SD above the mean) and a “normal” group (the rest of the participants) based on their anxiety and depression scores. Using the facial emotional perception task consisting of 11 intensity levels of positive and negative facial emotions, we estimated perceptual thresholds and sensitivity of the each group. For positive emotions, the highly depressive group perceived ‘happiness’ at lower intensities of happy facial expressions compared to the normal group. For negative emotions, both the elevated anxious and depressive groups perceived ‘anger’ at lower intensities of angry facial expressions compared to the normal groups. Compared to the normal groups, the perceptual sensitivity was significantly lower in both the anxiety- and depression-elevated groups, revealing that those children were less sensitive to changes in facial emotional expressions. Therefore, there were differences in perceptual thresholds and sensitivity between the highly anxious/depressed groups and the normal groups, especially with respect to negative emotions. Implications and limitations are discussed.

keywords
불안, 우울, 초등학생, 얼굴 표정, 정서 지각 역치, 민감성, anxiety, depression, elementary school student, facial expression, perceptual threshold of emotion, sensitivity

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