It is not good to have anxiety. Not only because of the effects it has on our body but also because it reduces our ability to recognize faces . Come on, you can pass by your mother and not recognize her.
In reality, the real interest it has for investigators is not precisely that of being able to recognize relatives on the street but something much more important: the reliability of eyewitnesses in a trial.
In two experiments, researchers from the British universities of Bristol and Aberdeen have shown that when we are anxious we are not able to discriminate between two words that sound similar, such as bed and cane, nor do we recognize the face of the same person in two different photographs .
You may wonder how these psychologists managed to provoke anxiety in the volunteers of the experiment: by putting on them a mask that inflated air enriched with CO2.
By the way, the real usefulness of this study is to have a perfect excuse when you want to be Swedish when you come across an acquaintance: "I'm sorry, boy, I hadn't seen you. I'm just stressed out."
