Anticipatory processing increases attentional biases to disgust faces in socially anxious individuals: Evidence from the N2pc and CDA

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Attentional biases to socially threatening facial expressions (anger, disgust) have been repeatedly observed in socially anxious individuals. These biases are thought to arise, in part, because anticipatory processing of social situations increases the salience of negative social cues. Additionally, self-focused attention on somatic symptoms of anxiety (e.g., heart rate) is thought to interfere with attentional bias. The goal of this study was to examine how anticipatory processing and self-focused attention affect attentional biases as reflected by reliable, temporally precise event-related potentials (ERPs), namely the N2pc and contralateral delay activity (CDA), which index selective attention and working memory maintenance, respectively. One-hundred forty undergraduate students at two collaborating universities completed a mentation task in which they were randomly assigned to engage in prompt-guided anticipatory processing or neutral distraction after being told that they would be evaluated during a social interaction with a researcher at the end of the study. Participants then completed a dot-probe task with disgust/neutral face pairs. To manipulate self-focused attention, the fixation cross was randomly rotated between (+) or (×), and participants were told that one of these indicated an increase in their heart rate. Probes appeared 800 ms after face stimulus offset so that the CDA could be measured. N2pc and CDA amplitude were larger in the anticipatory processing condition compared to distraction for socially anxious individuals, and this effect remained when controlling for depression. There was no effect involving self-focused attention. The results support anticipatory processing as an important process that affects attentional bias in socially anxious individuals.