Exploration of the Links Between Psychosocial Well-being and Face Recognition Skills in a French-Speaking Sample

Abstract

Face recognition abilities vary tremendously in the general population. People at the lower end of the spectrum, those with developmental prosopagnosia, report stress, anxiety or social interaction issues due to their poor face recognition abilities. It is thus important to develop adequate diagnostic tools convenient to use for clinicians and to examine relationships between face recognition skills and negative affects. In the present study, we provide a validated French translation of the 20-item prosopagnosia index (PI20), a self-report measure used to detect people with developmental facial identity recognition deficits (Shah et al., 2015; Tsantani et al., 2021). We also examined links between face recognition skills measured with the PI20 and a standard face recognition test (Cambridge face memory test-CFMT; Duchaine & Nakayama, 2006) and measures of social anxiety (social interaction anxiety scale, social phobia scale) and negative affects (state trait anxiety scale, Beck depression inventory). We did not find any significant correlation between the CFMT and measures of psychosocial well-being and only found a weak positive association between the PI20 and social interaction anxiety. Although this association is weak and warrants further research, raising awareness about developmental face recognition issues may help improve the well-being of people with facial identity recognition deficits and provide new investigation or intervention avenues for clinicians who treat patients with social interaction anxiety.