Eyes tell all: Dissecting attentional bias in social anxiety through emotional faces.

Attentional biases in social anxiety: An investigation using the inattentional blindness paradigm

Time course of attentional bias in social anxiety: Evidence from visuocortical dynamics

social anxiety disorder is the obvious and continuous fear of one or more social situations and manifests itself as the attentional bias to social stimuli,which includes facilitated attention,difficulty in disengaging,attentional avoidance,the three components that interact with each other and sustain the development of social anxiety.Currently,several paradigms involving dot-probe task,spatial cueing task and visual search task,combined with the eye scanning technique,are used to study attentional bias in social anxiety disorder.However,question remains about the relationship,time course and transition of the three components and calls for further research.

Attentional control has an important role in attentional bias in social anxiety. This study aimed to investigate whether attentional bias in social anxiety was caused by attentional control deficit. Event-related potentials and behavioural attentional bias index (trial-level attentional bias variability) were recorded as participants completed the dot-probe task. The behaviour result showed that compared with the low socially anxious individuals, the high socially anxious individuals had a marginally higher score of attentional bias variability. For event-related potentials results, target-locked frontocentral N2 amplitude was significantly larger under the incongruent condition than the congruent condition in the low socially anxious group, whereas there was no significant difference between these two conditions in the high socially anxious group. The low socially anxious group also exhibited reduced target-locked P2 amplitude from the congruent condition to the incongruent condition. Our findings provide electrophysiological evidence of attentional control dysregulation in socially anxious individuals, which contributes to modifying social anxiety-related attentional bias.

Background:Evidence suggests that individuals with social anxiety demonstrate vigilance to social threat, whilst the peptide hormone oxytocin is widely accepted as supporting affiliative behaviour in humans.Methods:This study investigated whether oxytocin can affect attentional bias in social anxiety. In a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled, within-group study design, 26 healthy and 16 highly socially anxious (HSA) male volunteers (within the HSA group, 10 were diagnosed with generalized social anxiety disorder) were administered 24 IU of oxytocin or placebo to investigate attentional processing in social anxiety. Attentional bias was assessed using the dot-probe paradigm with angry, fearful, happy and neutral face stimuli.Results:In the baseline placebo condition, the HSA group showed greater attentional bias for emotional faces than healthy individuals. Oxytocin reduced the difference between HSA and non-socially anxious individuals in attentional bias for emotional faces. Moreover, it appeared to normalize attentional bias in HSA individuals to levels seen in the healthy population in the baseline condition. The biological mechanisms by which oxytocin may be exerting these effects are discussed.Conclusions:These results, coupled with previous research, could indicate a potential therapeutic use of this hormone in treatment for social anxiety.

Conflicting findings concerning the nature and presence of attentional bias in social anxiety and social phobia have been reported in the literature. This paper reports the findings of two studies comparing people with high and low social anxiety on dot probe tasks using words, faces photographed in front view, and faces photographed in profile as stimuli. In Study 1 those with high social anxiety displayed an attentional bias towards negative faces. The low social anxiety group showed an attentional bias towards positive faces. No significant effects were observed on the dot probe using words as stimuli. Study 2 used pairs of faces presented in profile as though looking at each other. One of the faces displayed either a positive, negative or neutral expression. The second face always had a neutral expression, and in half of the trials it was the subject's own face. The findings of this more ecologically valid procedure replicated those of Study 1. Facilitated attention to dots following emotional faces was specific to threatening facial stimuli. From these studies it appears that the facial dot probe task is a more sensitive index of attentional bias than the word task in a non-clinical sample with social anxiety.

ABSTRACTDeath anxiety is a basic fear underlying a range of psychological conditions, and has been found to increase avoidance in social anxiety. Given that attentional bias is a core feature of social anxiety, the aim of the present study was to examine the impact of mortality salience (MS) on attentional bias in social anxiety. Participants were 36 socially anxious and 37 non-socially anxious individuals, randomly allocated to a MS or control condition. An eye-tracking procedure assessed initial bias towards, and late-stage avoidance of, socially threatening facial expressions. As predicted, socially anxious participants in the MS condition demonstrated significantly more initial bias to social threat than non-socially anxious participants in the MS condition and socially anxious participants in the control condition. However, this effect was not found for late-stage avoidance of social threat. These findings suggest that reminders of death may heighten initial vigilance towards social threat.

Hypervigilance and attentional bias to threat faces with low-spatial-frequency (LSF) information have been found in individuals with social anxiety. The vigilance-avoidance hypothesis posits that socially anxious individuals exhibit initial vigilance and later avoidance to threatening cues. However, the temporal dynamics of these two processes in response to various LSF threats in social anxiety remain unclear. In the current study, we presented faces containing anger, disgust, and fear in high and low spatial frequencies and compared the neural correlates with sensory perception and attention in individuals with high versus low social anxiety (HSA/LSA, n=24). A visual search task was used to investigate the attentional effects of threats and spatial frequencies, and event-related potentials, particularly, the visual components of P1 and P250, were measured to index visual perceptual and attentional processes, respectively. We found that HSA individuals showed pronounced P1 and reduced P250 to LSF (vs. HSF) faces, regardless of emotion type, suggesting a general pattern of initial vigilance and later avoidance to LSF faces in social anxiety. Furthermore, while LSA individuals showed enhanced P250 to both fear and disgust (vs. neutral) faces, HSA individuals showed pronounced P250 to disgust faces alone. Our results, thus, elucidate the temporal profile of early vigilance and later avoidance in social anxiety, highlighting its broad implication for all faces and predominance in the low spatial frequency. Considering individual threats, our results demonstrate specific attentional avoidance of fear faces in social anxiety.

The mechanisms and triggers of the attentional bias in social anxiety are not yet fully determined, and the modulating role of personality traits is being increasingly acknowledged. Our main purpose was to test whether social anxiety is associated with mechanisms of hypervigilance, avoidance (static biases), vigilance-avoidance or the maintenance of attention (dynamic biases). Our secondary goal was to explore the role of personality structure in shaping the attention bias. Participants with high vs low social anxiety and different personality structures viewed pairs of faces (free-viewing eye-tracking task) representing different emotions (anger, happiness and neutrality). Their eye movements were registered and analysed for both whole-trial (static) and time-dependent (dynamic) measures. Comparisons between participants with high and low social anxiety levels did not yield evidence of differences in eye-tracking measures for the whole trial (latency of first fixation, first fixation direction, total dwell time), but the two groups differed in the time course of overt attention during the trial (dwell time across three successive time segments): participants with high social anxiety were slower in disengaging their attention from happy faces. Similar results were obtained using a full-sample, regression-based analysis. Our results speak in favour of a maintenance bias in social anxiety. Preliminary results indicated that personality structure may not affect the maintenance (dynamic) bias of socially anxious individuals, although depressive personality structures may favour manifestations of a (static) hypervigilance bias.

Continual training of attentional bias in social anxiety

Similar attention patterns have been found in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and autistic traits (ATs). The Intense World Theory and previous studies suggest that individuals with ASD may demonstrate a vigilance-avoidance attention pattern toward emotional faces. However, the attention patterns in individuals with ATs remain unclear. Therefore, this study employs eye-tracking technology to examine the characteristics and temporal course of attention bias toward emotional faces in individuals with ATs. The Autism-spectrum Quotient (AQ) was used to evaluate the level of ATs among 2,502 college students. A total of 50 participants were selected from the 2,502 college students: 25 high-AQ group participants were randomly selected from the 10% of individuals with the highest AQ scores. Similarly, 25 low-AQ group participants were randomly selected from the 10% of participants with the lowest AQ scores. All selected participants completed an eye-tracking study while performing a dot-probe task with emotional faces (positive-neutral, negative-neutral, and negative-positive). By analyzing data from different time periods, the attention bias and time course of individuals with ATs toward emotional faces were investigated. The results show that compared to the low-AQ group, the high-AQ group detected negative faces faster in the early stages of emotional face processing. As the presentation time of emotional faces increased (at the 2-3 s mark), the fixation scores for negative-neutral faces of the high-AQ group were less than 0.5, which was significantly lower than those of the low-AQ group. Meanwhile, the high-AQ group showed brief attentional avoidance toward positive emotion at 3-4 s in the positive-neutral trials, indicating that the high-AQ group exhibited attention avoidance to both negative and positive faces during the middle and later stages of emotional processing. This study suggests that individuals with ATs display a vigilance-avoidance pattern toward emotional faces. It contributes to a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of attention in persons with ATs and further supports the Intense World Theory.

We systematically compared different measures of attentional bias (i.e., reaction times, the N2pc component in the EEG, and explicit stimulus ratings) on their ability to reveal attentional engagement to threatening versus neutral facial stimuli in a Dot Probe Task and tested their relation to trait measures of general and social anxiety. We found that the N2pc component reflects a bias toward angry faces with excellent internal consistency. Similar results were obtained for explicit ratings. Reaction time (RT) differences, however, were not indicative of attentional biases and showed zero odd-even reliability. We further found that both higher (i.e., more negative) N2pc amplitudes and earlier peak latencies were associated with more severe symptoms of social anxiety even when controlling for general trait anxiety. The explicit rating biases were also specifically associated with social anxiety. Conversely, the RT bias was not related to social anxiety levels but to general trait anxiety. This highlights the importance of valid and reliable outcome measures for interventions such as attentional bias modification protocols. Mutual exclusivity of different bias operationalizations is discussed.

The vigilance–avoidance hypothesis suggests that socially anxious individuals attempt to detect signs that they are being evaluated (vigilance) and subsequently direct attention away from such stimuli (avoidance). Although extensive evidence supports vigilance, data concerning subsequent avoidance is equivocal. Drawing from models of attention, the current study hypothesised that working memory load moderates late attentional bias in social anxiety such that avoidance occurs if working memory load is low, and difficulty disengaging attention occurs if working memory load is high. Forty-one undergraduates (19 socially anxious; 22 non-anxious controls) completed a dot-probe task with emotional (happy and disgust) and neutral facial expressions and a concurrent n-back task. Results supported the hypothesis such that socially anxious subjects demonstrated avoidance of disgust faces when working memory load was absent, but had difficulty disengaging attention during high working memory load. Theoretical implications and directions for future research are discussed.

Social anxiety and detection of facial untrustworthiness: Spatio-temporal oculomotor profiles

Looking at the self in front of others: Neural correlates of attentional bias in social anxiety