Is Test Anxiety Written in the Face? Intra-Individual Analyses of Attentional Bias Using Facial Expressions

• In Event: 25.023 - Show...and Tell? Using Behavioral Observation to Study Affective Processes in Educational Settings

Abstract

Anxious individuals attend more readily to threat-relevant than neutral stimuli, an effect called attentional bias (AB; Bar-Haim et al., 2007). Thus, traditional AB research based on dot probe tasks assumes that reaction times (RT) will be shorter for probes that replace stressors as compared with neutral stimuli. Recently, two studies investigated AB in achievement contexts but reported mixed findings for differences in RTs between threat-related and neutral stimuli (Dong et al., 2016; Putwain et al., 2011). By integrating continuous behavioral assessments into the AB paradigm, this study examines whether changes in facial expressions indexing emotional responses to stressors present a more sensitive indicator of bias. Our study is grounded in the premise that the experience of achievement-related anxiety shifts attention to the object of emotion (Pekrun, 2006). According to component models of emotion, as a consequence of attention and subsequent appraisals, different facial configurations emerge (Scherer et al., 2013). Accordingly, we would expect test anxious individuals to express anxiety when registering achievement-related stressors.
Fifty-eight university students (Mage = 20.7 years, SD = 2.45; 39 female) were randomly assigned to an anxiety (EG) or control group (CG), and positioned in front of a computer connected to a video camera and AFFDEXTM, an automatic facial action coding software provided in iMotions (2018; Littlewort et al., 2011). Students then recalled an important exam situation in which they experienced test anxiety (EG), or an unimportant exam about which they felt indifferent (CG). Next, students completed dot-probe trials in which word pairs consisting of a test-related stimuli (e.g., ‘failure’; 24 critical trials)) and a neutral word (e.g., ‘pencil’), or of two neutral words (24 filler trials), were followed by an arrow probe (Figure 1). Students had to indicate the direction of the probe as quickly as possible.
EG students reported feeling more anxious, and less relaxed, than CG students, Fs (1, 55) ≥ 14.7, ps < .001, ≥ .21 (Table 1). In line with previous empirical work, bias scores of mean RTs did not differ between the groups, t(56) = 0.95, p = .348, d = 0.25. Furthermore, the results of coded facial expression revealed no differences between the EG and CG during recall of an exam situation, Fs (1, 55) = .90, p =.35, = .02 (Table 1). However, despite lack of sensitivity for recollections of past events, facial expressions may inform us about biased responses to currently perceived achievement-related stressors (Hildebrandt et al., 2015). Consequently, we are currently conducting intra-individual analyses of facial expressions as an index for affective responding to attended stimuli.
While our findings show that between-person analyses of RT may fail to detect AB in test-anxious students, there are a number of intra-individual processes that must be considered in order to examine attentional processes more closely. This paper will report whether intra-individual analysis of facial expression can be used to trace affective responses and attention allocation to emotional versus neutral stressors

Authors

• Sandra Becker, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

• Kristina Loderer, University of Munich

• Reinhard Pekrun, University of Essex

• Felix Suessenbach, University of Munich