Abstract
Previous studies have found that poor social functioning is related to impaired facial expression recognition in individuals with Internet gaming disorder (IGD). However, these studies have focused on ordinary facial expression recognition and have not investigated micro-expression (ME) recognition. Thus, this study aimed to explore whether individuals with IGD have impairments in ME recognition and its psychological mechanism. In this study, 60 individuals with IGD and 60 healthy controls (HCs) were recruited to test their ME recognition ability using the Japanese and Caucasian Brief Affect Recognition Test (JACBART). Furthermore, their levels of IGD, depression, anxiety, and social anxiety were measured. The results were as follows: (1) the accuracy of recognizing MEs in individuals with IGD was significantly lower than that in HCs, and the reaction time (RT) in individuals with IGD was significantly longer than that in HCs; (2) the accuracy of recognizing happy MEs was significantly lower than that of recognizing angry MEs in individuals with IGD; (3) the score in the Interaction Anxiousness Scale was negatively correlated with the accuracy of recognizing happy MEs but positively correlated with the accuracy of recognizing angry MEs in individuals with IGD. These results implied that individuals with IGD had an overall impairment in ME recognition and a more significant impairment in the recognition of happy MEs; meanwhile, impairment in recognizing happy MEs was associated with social anxiety.
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Data Availability Statements
The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the present study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable requests.
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This research was supported by the Humanities and Social Science Fund of Ministry of Education of China (No.21YJA190002).
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Li-yan Fan: Conceptualization, Investigation, Formal analysis, Writing - original draft. Jin-bo He: Investigation, Formal analysis, Writing - review and editing, Supervision. Yang Zheng: Investigation, Writing - review and editing. Yu-feng Nie: Investigation, Writing - review and editing. Tao-lin Chen: Software, Writing - review and editing. Hong-mei Zhang: Writing - review and editing.
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Fan, L., He, J., Zheng, Y. et al. Facial micro-expression recognition impairment and its relationship with social anxiety in internet gaming disorder. Curr Psychol 42, 21021–21030 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-02958-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-02958-7