Abstract
Although previous studies showed that social anxiety disorder (SAD) exhibits the attentional bias for angry faces, few studies investigated effective face recognition combined with event-related potential (ERP) technique in SAD patients, especially the treatment effect. This study examines the differences in face processing in SAD patients before and after treatment and healthy control people (H-group). High-density EEG scans were registered in response to emotional schematic faces, particularly interested in the face processing N170 component. Analysis of N170 amplitude revealed a larger N170 for P-group-pre in response to inverted and upright stimuli than H-group in the right hemisphere. The result of the intragroup t-test showed that N170 was delayed for inverted relative to upright faces only in P-group-post and H-group but not in P-group-pre. Remarkably, the results of ANOVAs manifested that emotional expression cannot modulate N170 for SAD patients. Besides, the N170-based asymmetry index (AI) was introduced to analyze the left- and right-hemisphere dominance of N170 for three groups. It was found that, with the improvement of patients' treatment, the value of AIN170−base d presented a decreasing trend. These results together suggested that there was no inversion effect observed for patients with SAD. The change in the value of AIN170−base d can be used as potential electrophysiological markers for the diagnosis and treatment effects on patients with SAD.
Highlights
Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is an anxiety disorder accompanied by both unusual physical and mental symptoms, mainly characterized by intense fear when facing social interaction context or public places
Patients with SAD exhibit a more robust amygdala activation in response to neutral faces than healthy control individuals [3], while affective context can modulate the processing of neutral faces for patients with SAD [4]
It could be seen that the right predominant N170 was mainly concentrated in posterior-temporal regions
Summary
Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is an anxiety disorder accompanied by both unusual physical and mental symptoms, mainly characterized by intense fear when facing social interaction context or public places. Previous studies have indicated that patients with SAD are associated with deficits in social cognition, including several cognitive biases such as expectation bias, attention bias, memory bias, and response bias to faces, even for neutral faces [1, 2]. Patients with SAD exhibit a more robust amygdala activation in response to neutral faces than healthy control individuals [3], while affective context can modulate the processing of neutral faces for patients with SAD [4]. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) study suggested that patients with SAD show reduced N170 representing early fusiform gyrus activity compared to healthy controls [5]. Given the abnormality of SAD patients in face processing, the early-stage neural responses of patients with SAD may be different compared with healthy individuals and may change with treatment
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