Abstract
Instrumental learning paradigms are rarely employed to investigate the mechanisms underlying acquired fear responses in social anxiety. Here, we adapted a probabilistic category learning paradigm to assess information processing biases as a function of the degree of social anxiety traits in a sample of healthy individuals without a diagnosis of social phobia. Participants were presented with three pairs of neutral faces with differing probabilistic accuracy contingencies (A/B: 80/20, C/D: 70/30, E/F: 60/40). Upon making their choice, negative and positive feedback was conveyed using angry and happy faces, respectively. The highly socially anxious group showed a strong tendency to be more accurate at learning the probability contingency associated with the most ambiguous stimulus pair (E/F: 60/40). Moreover, when pairing the most positively reinforced stimulus or the most negatively reinforced stimulus with all the other stimuli in a test phase, the highly socially anxious group avoided the most negatively reinforced stimulus significantly more than the control group. The results are discussed with reference to avoidance learning and hypersensitivity to negative socially evaluative information associated with social anxiety.
Highlights
Social anxiety refers to the feelings of uneasiness that emerge during social interactions from being judged by other people
While decreased avoidance of the most negative reinforced stimulus using this kind of probabilistic paradigm has been linked with a reduced sensitivity to negative behavioral consequences (Klein et al, 2007), the present study shows that increased avoidance of the most negative reinforced stimulus is associated with heightened sensitivity to negative social consequences
The present findings indicate the promise of this approach in unraveling information processing biases that are specific to social anxiety
Summary
Social anxiety refers to the feelings of uneasiness that emerge during social interactions from being judged by other people. As the hallmark symptom of social anxiety disorder or social phobia is a disproportionate fear of negative evaluation, an attentional bias for negative social cues, such as angry facial expressions or averted eye gaze, are posited to lie at the root of this disorder given that these are overt indicators of social threat or rejection (Clark and Wells, 1995; Rapee and Heimberg, 1997). Evidence supporting this notion comes from both behavioral and neuroscientific studies (Mogg et al, 2004; Sewell et al, 2008). This bias for hypervigilance in social anxiety is a temporally limited phenomenon as it is restricted to the first 100–500 ms following the presentation of threatening stimuli (Staugaard, 2010)
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