Attentional resources in social anxiety and the effects of perceptual load

Abstract

According to the attentional control theory, anxious people should process task-irrelevant distractors more than non-anxious people. This could be due to them having more attentional resources to allocate to the processing of task-irrelevant distractors. The current study was designed to assess the processing of task-irrelevant stimuli in low- and high-socially-anxious people. We conducted four experiments using perceptual load tasks. In the high-perceptual-load condition, interference effects from task-irrelevant distractors were not observed in low-socially-anxious people. This finding is consistent with the view of exhausting attentional resources to process task-relevant stimuli. However, interference effects were observed in high-socially-anxious people in the case of high perceptual load (Experiment 1). These effects were observed when presenting the distractor at a fixation (Experiment 2) or attracting attention involuntarily to the target location by spatial cueing (Experiment 3). However, when distractors were masked to decrease their visibility, distractor processing was not observed (Experiment 4). These results suggested that people with high social anxiety may have more attentional resources than people with low social anxiety, and this might partially derive from enhanced stimulus-driven attention.