Abstract
Despite the growing evidence for the attentional bias toward emotional related stimuli in patients with social anxiety disorder (SAD), it remains unclear how the attentional bias manifests in normal individuals with SAD and/or depressive traits. To address this question, we recruited three groups of normal participants with different psychiatric traits—individuals with comorbid SAD and depression (SADd, N = 19), individuals with only SAD (SAD, N = 15), and healthy control individuals (HC, N = 19). In a dot-probe paradigm, participants view angry, disgusted, and sad face stimuli with durations ranging from very brief (i.e., 14ms) that renders stimuli completely intangible, to relatively long (i.e., 2000ms) that guarantees image visibility. We find significant early vigilance (i.e., on brief stimuli) and later avoidance (i.e., on long stimuli) toward angry faces in the SADd group. We also find vigilance toward angry and disgusted faces in the SAD group. To our best knowledge, this is the first study to unify both vigilance and avoidance within the same experimental paradigm, providing direct evidence for the “vigilance-avoidance” theory of comorbid SAD and depression. In sum, these results provide evidence for the potential behavioral differences induced by anxiety-depression comorbidity and a single trait in non-clinical populations, but the lack of a depression-only group cannot reveal the effects of high levels of depression on the results. The limitations are discussed.
Highlights
Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is a common debilitating emotional disorder and can cause severe emotional and social dysfunctions [1]
We described the major symptoms of social anxiety disorder (SAD) and introduced the recruitment criteria and the purpose of the study
We found that the SAD and depression (SADd) participants had a stronger attentional preference than SAD and HC on subliminal stimuli (SADd vs. SAD: p = 0.037, d = 0.41; SADd vs. HC: p < 0.001, d = 0.91)
Summary
Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is a common debilitating emotional disorder and can cause severe emotional and social dysfunctions [1]. One hypothesis is that people with SAD have an abnormally higher sensitivity to socially threatening information Such aberrant hypersensitivity enhances the degree of subjectively perceived threats, and, as a consequence, hinders social interactions [2]. This theory is supported by the lab-based experimental finding that people with SAD exhibit attentional hypersensitivity to socially threatening stimuli, such as negative emotional faces [3,4,5]. One frequently used task in this domain is the dot-probe task In this task, an emotional visual stimulus and a neutral stimulus are simultaneously presented on the two sides of a computer
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