Abstract
There is some research showing that social anxiety is related with attentional bias to threat. However, others fail to find this relationship and propose that gender differences may play a role. The aim of this study was to investigate the gender differences in the subcomponents of attentional bias to threat (hypervigilance and difficulty in disengaging) among children and adolescents with social anxiety. Overall, 181 youngsters aged between 10 and 14 participated in the current study. Images of disgusted faces were used as threat stimuli in an Exogenous Cueing Task was used to measure the subcomponents of attentional bias. Additionally, the Social Anxiety Scale for Children was used to measure social anxiety. The repeated measures ANOVA showed that male participants with high social anxiety showed difficulty in disengaging from threat, but this was not the case for female participants. Our results indicated that social anxiety is more related with attentional bias to threat among male children and adolescents than females. These findings suggested that developing gender-specific treatments for social anxiety may improve treatment effects.
Highlights
Social anxiety is one of the most prevalent forms of anxiety, which can develop into social anxiety disorder (Costello et al, 2005)
Thirteen participants were eliminated from the data analysis for the following reasons: (a) three failed to reach an accuracy of 90%; (b) three had trials for which reaction time (RT) lesser than 200 ms or more than 2000 ms accounted for more than 30% of the total trials; (c) two quit the experimental task because they failed to pass the practice stage; (d) two missed the experiment because of time conflicts; (e) three quit the ECT
The accuracy of responses for all participants was higher than 90%
Summary
Social anxiety is one of the most prevalent forms of anxiety, which can develop into social anxiety disorder (Costello et al, 2005). Individuals with social anxiety fear negative evaluation and persistently avoid social situations (Stein and Stein, 2008). This causes them to experience difficulty eating, communicating, and talking in public, and negatively impacts their social functioning (Stein, 1995; Zhang et al, 2016). Social anxiety reduces the academic ability of children and adolescents and places them at risk for insomnia, mood disorders, and problematic alcohol consumption in adulthood (Erwin et al, 2002; Buckner et al, 2006, 2008). The focus on cognitive processing in children and adolescents with social anxiety is of paramount importance
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