Electrophysiological Measures of Visual Working Memory in Social Anxiety.

Jing Yuan,Ningning Mao,Lixia Cui,Qin Zhang,Rongrong Chen

doi:10.3389/fnbeh.2020.00049

Jing Yuan, Ningning Mao + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2020.00049

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Abstract

Socially anxious individuals are very sensitive to threatening information in the environment, so visual working memory (VWM) is of great significance for them. However, the influence of social anxiety on VWM is unclear. In the present study, we aimed to investigate the VWM in individuals with social anxiety using electrophysiological techniques. Event-related potentials (ERPs) of high socially anxious (HSA) individuals and low socially anxious (LSA) individuals were recorded during a change-detection task with two memory conditions (two and four items). Electrophysiological results indicated that compared with the LSA individuals, the HSA individuals had significantly more active contralateral delay activity (CDA) in condition of memorizing four items. However, there was no significant difference between the HSA and LSA groups in response accuracy in the conditions memorizing two and four items. From the electrophysiological results, individuals with high social anxiety could maintain more information in VWM. However, maybe anxiety consumes the available cognitive resources to compensate for the supposed to be impaired effective performance, so that individuals with high social anxiety perform the same as individuals with low social anxiety in terms of behavioral outcomes.

Highlights

Social anxiety is an aversive emotional and motivational state characterized by an avoidance of social situations and a fear of negative evaluation (D’Avanzato and Dalrymple, 2016)
Consistent with prior reasoning, we proposed the hypotheses: high socially anxious (HSA) group would perform better than low socially anxious (LSA) group in the visual working memory (VWM) task
Further simple effect analysis revealed that there was no significant difference in contralateral delay activity (CDA) amplitude between the HSA and LSA groups when the memory items were two

Summary

Introduction

Social anxiety is an aversive emotional and motivational state characterized by an avoidance of social situations and a fear of negative evaluation (D’Avanzato and Dalrymple, 2016). Individuals with social anxiety usually express attentional bias when they process threated information (Chen et al, 2016; Wieser et al, 2018), which is thought to play an important role in the maintenance and development of social anxiety disorders (Rapee and Heimberg, 1997; Heimberg et al, 2010). Social-related threat will capture more attention of individuals with social anxiety (Grafton and MacLeod, 2016; Lazarov et al, 2016). Eysenck et al (2007) proposed that anxiety impaired attentional control processes by interfering with the balance between stimulus-driven and goal-directed attentional systems. Anxiety impairs two functions of attentional control, that is, inhibition and shifting, which leads to a decreased influence of the goal-directed attentional system and an increased influence of the stimulus-driven attentional system. Liang (2018) specified that the attentional control deficit in social anxiety was mainly

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