Face in the Crowd and Level of Self-Criticism

Thus far, there has been no face in the crowd research that also considers the level of self-criticism. This is despite the fact that self-criticism is the key underlying factor in psychopathology and that having objective criteria to diagnose it would be highly beneficial. Therefore, the aim of the current study was to explore fixation duration on all seven primary emotions (happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, contempt, anger, and surprise) as well as embarrassment and neutral face expression in relation to the level of self-criticism using a 3 x 3 face in the crowd grid. The convenience nonclinical sample contained 119 participants gathered through social media; 63.03% were women and 36.97% were men. We used The Forms of Self-Criticizing and Self-Reassuring Scale for measuring self-criticism, the Tobii X2 eye tracker, and the Amsterdam Dynamic Facial Expression Set-Bath Intensity Variations for eye-tracking of emotions. Results showed that highly self-critical people exhibited significant anger avoidance in attention and an attention avoidance tendency in relation to most emotions. The present findings may explain why highly self-critical people have difficulty identifying emotional expressions: They probably avoid looking at faces, which makes it harder for them to identify the expressions correctly.