© The Author(s) 2015

Facial expressions are a major source of social communication and accurate processing of them plays a crucial role for humans as social beings (Ekman, 1993; Fridlund, 1994). Given that fear of rejection is at the core of social anxiety disorder (SAD; Clark, 2005; Hofmann, 2007), most current models of social anxiety assume that socially anxious individuals are negatively biased in processing social threat and ambiguous information, includ-ing faces (e.g., Clark & Wells, 1995; Hofmann, 2007; Morrison & Heimberg, 2013). Even though the ability to recognize or cat-egorize emotions via facial expressions does not seem to be impaired by social anxiety (Plana, Lavoie, Battaglia, & Achim, 2014), socially anxious individuals might still be biased in inter-pretations of faces (Yoon & Zinbarg, 2008), and therefore could have more extreme emotional reactions to these expressions. The current review examines the data on the relationship between social anxiety and self-reported responses to faces. While socially anxious individuals have been shown to be negatively biased in the interpretation and evaluation of textua