Abstract
It is known that threatening stimuli increase emotional arousal, resulting in overestimating the subjective experience of passing time. Moreover, facial expressions and gaze direction interact to create socially threatening situations in people with social anxiety. The present study investigated the effect of social anxiety on the perceived duration of observing emotional faces with a direct or an averted gaze. Participants were divided into high, medium and low social anxiety groups based on social anxiety inventory scores. Participants then performed a temporal bisection task. Participants with high social anxiety provided larger overestimates for neutral faces with an averted gaze than those with low social anxiety in the second half of the task, whereas these differences were not found for angry face with direct and averted gaze. These results suggest that people with social anxiety perceive the duration of threatening situations as being longer than true durations based on objectively measured time.
Highlights
Brief Fear of Negative Evaluation scale (BFNE) score in participants with high social anxiety were significantly higher than the medium and low social anxiety, F(56) = 135.01, p < 0.001, η2p = 0.82
The percentage of “long” responses was calculated for each experimental condition and subjected to a mixed-model Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), with social anxiety as a between-subject variable and facial expression, gaze direction, stimulus duration, and trial block as within-subject variables (Tables 2 and 3)
Participants with high social anxiety overestimated the perceived duration of threatening faces, in the second block of experimental trials. This result partially supported our first prediction that high social anxiety participants would overestimate the duration of threatening faces relative to those with low social anxiety
Summary
According to the cognitive model of social anxiety (Clark and Wells, 1995; Rapee and Heimberg, 1997), people with social anxiety tend to have attentional biases directed toward potentially threatening stimuli such as negative facial expressions (Mogg et al, 2004), direct eye-contact (Horley et al, 2004), and social interactions with others (Amin et al, 1998; Stopa and Clark, 2000; Ishikawa et al, 2012). Mogg et al (2004) used a visual probe task and found that people with social anxiety had an attentional bias toward angry faces, as compared with happy and neutral faces. In addition to such attentional biases, socially anxious individuals tend to display a negative interpretational bias in social situations (Amin et al, 1998; Stopa and Clark, 2000; Ishikawa et al, 2012).
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