Abstract
Attentional biases are a core characteristic of social anxiety (SA). However, research has yielded conflicting findings and failed to investigate these biases in real, face-to-face social situations. Therefore, this study examined attentional biases in SA by measuring participants’ eye gaze within a novel eye-tracking paradigm during a real-life social situation. Student participants (N = 30) took part in what they thought was a visual search study, when a confederate posing as another participant entered the room. Whilst all participants avoided looking at the confederate, those with higher SA fixated for a shorter duration during their first fixation on him, and executed fewer fixations and saccades overall as well as exhibiting a shorter scanpath. These findings are indicative of additional avoidance in the higher SA participants. In contrast to previous experimental work, we found no evidence of social hypervigilance or hyperscanning in high SA individuals. The results indicate that in unstructured social settings, avoidance rather than vigilance predominates, especially in those with higher SA.
Highlights
Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is characterised by an excessive fear of negative social evaluation and avoidance of social situations [1]
In order to find evidence of hyperscanning, we examined several eye movement measures which are suggested by Chen et al as possible markers of this monitoring strategy, The primary measure of hyperscanning is typically taken as a longer total scanpath length which is simple to extract from screen-based eye tracking datasets by summing all recorded saccade amplitudes, but this is less straightforward from mobile eye tacking data
These findings suggest that a different viewing strategy is employed by participants higher in social anxiety (SA) when in an unpredictable social setting, one which suggests an additional level of avoidance and inhibition over and above that shown by those lower in SA
Summary
Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is characterised by an excessive fear of negative social evaluation and avoidance of social situations [1]. By viewing others as fundamentally threatening, those with the disorder (and those with high levels of undiagnosed social anxiety, referred to as SA) increase the likelihood of being negatively evaluated by others due to their cognitive and behavioural responses to this perceived social threat. Prominent cognitive and behavioural models of SAD [2,3,4] set out the processes which lead to this fear of the social world. Whilst these models may diverge in their specifics, all have agreed that biases in attention are critical to the development and maintenance of SA.
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