Contemptuous expressions during encoding attenuate facial identity recognition in visual working memory in social anxiety: behavioural and electrophysiological evidence

The cognitive-behavioural model emphasises that processing biases are central to the development and maintenance of social anxiety. This study examined how contemptuous facial expressions during encoding influence subsequent recognition of neutral face identity in visual working memory. 32 socially anxious individuals and 32 healthy controls completed a delayed face discrimination task while ERPs were recorded. Behaviourally, socially anxious participants showed lower discrimination sensitivity (d', discrimination power of face identity recognition) and reduced hit rates for faces encoded with contemptuous versus happy expressions, whereas healthy controls showed comparable d' and hit rates across expression conditions. Neurally, socially anxious individuals exhibited larger P1 amplitudes during encoding, enhanced N170 amplitudes for contemptuous faces, and reduced N170 and N250 amplitudes to neutral probes previously encoded with contemptuous expressions. In contrast, healthy controls showed no significant ERP differences between expression conditions. Together, these results indicate that socially threatening cues elicit heightened early perceptual processing but impair the formation and retrieval of facial identity representations, providing converging behavioural and electrophysiological evidence of negative processing bias in social anxiety.