Does social support protect against recognition of angry facial expressions following failure?

Herein we examined the ability of perceived social support to modulate the recognition of facial expressions. Specifically, we hypothesised that perceived social support would serve as a "protective lens", biasing individuals against recognition of angry faces and towards recognizing happy ones. Experimentally inducing failure and success in a performance task, we examined both main and interactive effects of perceived social support. Under experimentally induced failure, perceived social support was negatively associated with recognizing angry emotional face expression. Interestingly, we also found a trend toward a positive association between perceived social support and recognition of happy facial expression, irrespective of the failure/success experimental manipulation. These findings elucidate a potential link between social/personality and cognitive processes underlying the perception of emotional facial expression.