Social anxiety and attention to dynamic disgust facial expression: No more attention captured from evidence of N2pc

Abstract

In this study we investigated the role of stimulus-driven attention in the attentional bias in individuals with social anxiety using electrophysiological technique. For this purpose, we employed static and dynamic facial expressions as stimuli in a dot-probe task. The results revealed that in behavior high socially anxious (HSA) group had longer response time in incongruent trials than congruent trials, and showed higher trial level-bias score variability than low socially anxious (LSA) group. In electrophysiology, we found that compared to LSA group, HSA group showed an enhanced N2pc amplitude to disgust facial expressions in static condition, whereas this difference was eliminated in dynamic facial expression condition. The results suggest the faces with peak emotion intensity are more likely to capture initial attention of individuals with social anxiety.