Abstract
The anti-saccade task has been used to measure attentional control related to general anxiety but less so with social anxiety specifically. Previous research has not been conclusive in suggesting that social anxiety may lead to difficulties in inhibiting faces. It is possible that static face paradigms do not convey a sufficient social threat to elicit an inhibitory response in socially anxious individuals. The aim of the current study was twofold. We investigated the effect of social anxiety on performance in an anti-saccade task with neutral or emotional faces preceded either by a social stressor (Experiment 1), or valenced sentence primes designed to increase the social salience of the task (Experiment 2). Our results indicated that latencies were significantly longer for happy than angry faces. Additionally, and surprisingly, high anxious participants made more erroneous anti-saccades to neutral than angry and happy faces, whilst the low anxious groups exhibited a trend in the opposite direction. Results are consistent with a general approach-avoidance response for positive and threatening social information. However increased socio-cognitive load may alter attentional control with high anxious individuals avoiding emotional faces, but finding it more difficult to inhibit ambiguous faces. The effects of social sentence primes on attention appear to be subtle but suggest that the anti-saccade task will only elicit socially relevant responses where the paradigm is more ecologically valid.
Highlights
Social anxiety can be induced by various social contexts including real or imagined performance situations, personal interactions or being observed in public [1]
The data failed the Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests for the HSA group on angry faces, k-s(32) = 0.16, p = 0.04, and for the MSA group with inverted faces, k-s(27) = 0.2, p = 0.01, it was normal for all other variables
A Kruskal-Wallis test revealed no differences between anxiety groups for angry faces, H(2) = 0.36, p = 0.83; happy faces, H(2) = 0.51, p = 0.77; inverted faces, H(2) = 4.57, p = 0.1 or neutral faces, H(2) = 0.69, p = 0.71
Summary
Social anxiety can be induced by various social contexts including real or imagined performance situations, personal interactions or being observed in public [1]. Information processing biases such as increased or reduced attention to faces have important implications for the developmental trajectory of social anxiety [2, 3]. Bogels and Mansell [4] have highlighted the potential relationship between attentional control (i.e., the way that individuals can control their attention towards a goal-oriented stimuli and ignore an irrelevant stimuli) and attentional biases in social anxiety. Socially anxious individuals may differ in their ability either to control their selective attention or their ability to ignore irrelevant stimuli such as socially threatening faces. Our ability to attend to task relevant but ignore task-irrelevant stimuli relies on the interaction between bottom up sensory processing (salience driven)
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