Emotion sensitivity and self‐reported symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder across the lifespan: A population‐based sample approach

Background Individuals with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) symptoms show deficits in emotion processing, but results of prior studies have been conflicting, and little is known about developmental trajectories of emotion processing over time. We examined the association between GAD symptoms and sensitivity to recognizing emotional facial expressions (emotion sensitivity: ES) for three emotions (happiness, anger, fear) in a large, diverse, population‐based sample. We hypothesized that higher anxiety scores would be associated with poorer performance, and expected that ES performance and anxiety scores would decline across the lifespan.