Perceiving the Self and Emotions with an Anxious Mind: Evidence from an Implicit Perceptual Task.

Anxiety disorders cause mental distress and low wellbeing in many people worldwide. Theories of anxiety describe negative worldviews and self-views as maintaining factors of the disorders. Recent research in social cognition has found a link between depression and altered perceptual biases to emotions, but the same research on anxiety is still missing. In this study, we measured perceptual biases to emotional and self-related stimuli in sub-clinically anxious participants and healthy controls using a self-emotional shape-label matching task. Results demonstrate that anxious participants had a diminished perceptual self-bias compared with healthy controls. Furthermore, the severity of anxiety was related to an emotional bias towards valanced other-related stimuli. The findings confirm the hypothesis that anxious individuals display an altered self-prioritisation effect in comparison with healthy individuals and that anxiety severity is linked to altered responses to emotionally valanced others. These findings have potential implications for early diagnosis and treatment of anxiety disorders.

Profile Pictures in the Digital World: Self-Photographs Predict Better Life Satisfaction.

Profiles pictures as online identities represent an extension of the user's self in the digital world. Changes in self-representation are responsible for reduced well-being in individuals in the offline world. However, whether profile picture selection predicts the well-being of internet users is unknown. To address this question, we tested the relationship between the type of profile picture (e.g., self-photographs or other pictures) used on social media and the life satisfaction of internet users, accounting for gender and personality traits that have been thought to relate to the selection of profile pictures. The results showed that individuals using self-photographs as profiles reported a higher level of life satisfaction compared to individuals using other pictures as profiles. This effect was influenced by gender, openness, and extraversion. Hierarchical regression and moderation analyses revealed that openness and profile type interacted to predict life satisfaction in women, while openness and profile picture independently predicted life satisfaction in men. Furthermore, extraversion directly predicted life satisfaction in both men and women. These results indicate that the consistency between one's online and offline self-representation may characterize internet users' well-being, with potential implications for digital wellness.