Audiovisual integration of faces and voices in Chinese individuals with social anxiety.

In our daily lives, we perceive the emotions of others usually through a variety of modalities such as faces, voices, gestures, etc. However, very few studies have investigated the multisensory integration of emotional information. In the current study, we aimed to explored the audiovisual integration of faces and voices in individuals with social anxiety. In Experiment 1, individuals with social anxiety disorder (SAD) and healthy controls (HCs) participated in an emotion categorisation task using static angry and happy faces and voices. The results showed that for angry emotion, compared to auditory stimuli, the SAD group took shorter to categorise audiovisual stimuli; while the HC group took shorter to categorise audiovisual stimuli than visual stimuli. In Experiment 2, We replaced static faces with dynamic faces. The results showed that facilitation effects of audiovisual integration for angry emotion in both groups. In addition, we found that the SAD group took longer to identify the angry emotion with the audiovisual modality compared to the HC group. However, these effects were only observed for reaction time, not accuracy. Our findings have implications for interventions for social anxiety.