A face to be loved or feared? A follow-up on interindividual differences and clinical implications

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Florian Bublatzky
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology ; Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology
• Term: from 2016 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 290032019

The expectation of a negative event is often worse than its experience. This follow-up project focuses on social learning and person perception as a function of interindividual differences and its clinical implications. In the first funding period, I have investigated how aversive anticipations, as triggered by verbal instructions, modulate face and person perception. Threat-related biases in attentional processing, associative learning, and physiological responding were observed. In healthy participants, these biases showed high covariance with self-reported social and trait anxiety. The second funding period will focus on the role of threat-related biases in normal and pathological anxiety. To this end, the overall variance in vulnerability factors for anxiety (e.g. threat-related biases, previous trauma experience) will be enhanced by including participants with moderate to high levels of social and trait anxiety, as well as individuals with adverse childhood experiences. In addition, an intensified focus will be on changing threatening associations. Here, reversal learning will be used to shift contextual threat to safety and the workings of multiple repeated reversal instructions will be examined. Moreover, combinations of social-emotional information will be tested as explicit safety cues (e.g. smiling romantic partner cueing safety) under long-term threatening conditions. Attentional processes, psychophysiological responding, behavioral measures and questionnaire data are examined to link face perception and social learning. Taken together, a dimensional transdiagnostic approach is chosen with a focus on threat-related biases in person perception – from healthy functional to the anxiety disorder spectrum.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants