Low Social Anxiety Research Articles

Social anxiety is related to impaired ability to filter out irrelevant information but not reduced storage capacity

Individuals with social anxiety have deficits in inhibiting task-irrelevant threatening information, but the mechanism is poorly understood. In this study, we instructed participants with high and low social anxiety to perform a variant change-detection task, recording their accuracy and electrophysiological data. The results indicated that individuals with high social anxiety showed impaired ability to filter out irrelevant information in disgust facial expression condition rather than neutral facial expression. While individuals with low social anxiety didn’t show filter efficiency defects under both disgust and neutral facial expressions. Furthermore, we found high socially anxious individuals could hold more information in visual working memory than low socially anxious individuals. These results suggest that the abundance of cognitive resources in socially anxious individuals compensates the presumed weak performance in accuracy produced by impaired filter efficiency. These results provide support for the claims of efficiency and effectiveness in attentional control theory.

Interpersonal Patterns in Social Anxiety Disorder: Predictors and Outcomes of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy

Given the strong associations of social anxiety disorder (SAD) with interpersonal problems and insecure attachment, this study sought to examine specific interpersonal problem domains in relation to the outcome of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) for SAD. Ninety-five adults with SAD received individual CBT and completed a measure of attachment style at pretreatment, as well as measures of interpersonal problems and social anxiety at pre- and posttreatment. At baseline, social anxiety was significantly associated with overall interpersonal problems, multiple specific interpersonal problems, as well as insecure attachment. Interpersonal problems decreased significantly over the course of treatment but did not predict a reduction in social anxiety. No specific interpersonal problem predicted changes in social anxiety. The greatest changes from pre- to posttreatment were observed across avoidance-related interpersonal problems. Higher levels of secure attachment predicted lower social anxiety, but individuals with less secure attachment experienced a greater reduction in social anxiety from pre- to posttreatment. However, this interaction was significant for only one of three measures of social anxiety. Our findings suggest that although higher levels of interpersonal problems and lower levels of secure attachment predict greater social anxiety, interpersonal problems and insecure attachment do not predict poorer treatment outcome.

Disgust face captures more attention in individuals with high social anxiety when cognitive resources are abundant: Evidence from N2pc

There is a debate about the relative contributions of top-down and bottom-up attention to the threat-related attentional bias. In this study we investigated the attentional bias in individuals with social anxiety under conditions of no, low and high visual working memory (WM) load. Event-related potential (ERP) and response time (RT) data were recorded while participants performed the dot-probe task and a concurrent change-detection task. The ERP results revealed that the maximum N2pc effect emerged in no visual WM load condition in individuals with social anxiety. The difference of N2pc effect between high socially anxious (HSA) and low socially anxious (LSA) groups was observed in no visual WM load condition, whereas this difference was eliminated under low and high load conditions. However, no significant main effects or interactions were observed in the behavioral index (reflected by Trial Level-Bias Score variability). Overall, the findings indicate the critical role of top-down attention on social anxiety-related attentional bias, which have important implication for attentional bias modification.

Social anxiety and salesperson performance: The roles of mindful acceptance and perceived sales manager support

Social anxiety affects salespeople. Yet little is known about its association with salesperson performance and the resources that might alleviate its presumably negative impact. Drawing from work on social and clinical psychology, this study investigates how personal (i.e., mindful acceptance) and social (i.e., perceived sales manager support) interventions can serve as safeguarding mechanisms that salespeople can leverage to reduce social anxiety and its impact. The findings, derived from a dataset consisting of survey data collected from 135 business-to-business salespeople matched with objective sales performance data, show that social anxiety is negatively associated with sales performance. The results also show that higher levels of mindful acceptance and perceived sales manager support are associated with lower social anxiety and alleviate the negative relationship between social anxiety and sales performance. The findings and implications are examined through in-depth interviews with fifteen sales professionals. Implications of this research are also discussed.

Self-focused attention vs. negative attentional bias during public speech task in socially anxious individuals

Enhanced self-focused attention (SFA) and negative attentional bias (NAB) towards social cues are characteristic hallmarks of social anxiety. It is essential to investigate these two attentional phenomena under socially relevant situations using comparable stimuli. In the present study, individuals with high social anxiety (HSA, n = 32) and low social anxiety (LSA, n = 29) were compared according to their attention toward self-related stimuli and toward positive, neutral, and negative feedback related stimuli. Video stimuli of moving indicators of self-anxiety-status and positive, neutral, and negative feedback from an audience were presented during an impromptu speech task (high anxiety condition) and a re-watching phase (low anxiety condition). Eye movements in response to the different stimuli served as readouts for attentional preference. An interaction effect suggested that the HSA group directed more attention to self-related stimuli relative to other stimuli and the LSA group only during the high anxiety condition. The LSA group exhibited a general attentional preference toward positive feedback, especially during the low anxiety condition. Meanwhile, only the total duration of fixation on positive feedback negatively correlated with subjective anxiety rating. Our results point to increased SFA rather than NAB in HSA individuals under social threats.

ERP evidence for emotional sensitivity in social anxiety

BackgroundEmotional sensitivity involves the ability to recognize and interpret facial expressions. This is very important for interpersonal communication. Previous studies found differences in emotional sensitivity between high social anxiety (HSA) individuals and low social anxiety (LSA) individuals. However, the underlying neural mechanisms are still unclear. The present study explored the effects of expression intensity and social anxiety on emotional sensitivity and their neural mechanisms. MethodsThe HSA group (n = 20) and the LSA group (n = 20) were asked to recognize anger expressions with different intensities in an emotion recognition task. The hit rate, reaction time, early time window (P1, N170), and late time window (LPP) were recorded. ResultsThe results showed that individuals with HSA had a significantly higher hit rate and shorter reaction time than individuals with LSA (p < 0.01). Event-related potential (ERP) results showed that, compared to the LSA group, the HSA group exhibited significantly enhanced N170 and LPP amplitude (p < 0.01). However, the difference in P1 amplitude was not significant (p > 0.05). LimitationsThe participants in this study were a subclinical social anxiety sample, and the effects of other mood disorders were not excluded, partially limiting the generalizability of the results. ConclusionsOur findings suggest that, compared to LSA individuals, HSA individuals are more sensitive to all presented faces. The ERP results indicated that HSA individuals’ high sensitivity to threatening expressions is related to stronger structural encoding and fine processing.

Look at me: The relation between empathy and fixation on the emotional eye-region in low vs. high social anxiety

Background and objectivesFixation on another person's eye-region may be an effective measure of one's level of empathy. In the present study, we tested the hypothesis that this type of empathy measure may not be appropriate for individuals with high levels of social anxiety, since avoidance or hypervigilance attentional biases towards emotional faces are frequent in this condition. MethodsUsing eye-tracking, we measured fixation time on the eye-region of another person in participants with low vs. high social anxiety, and we correlated this measure with empathy levels. In a second eye-tracking task, the two groups of participants were presented with pairs of emotional-neutral faces to determine the presence of attentional biases. ResultsWhile participants with low social anxiety showed an association between empathy and fixation time on the other person's eyes, the association was null for participants with high social anxiety. Attentional biases towards emotional faces were absent in high social anxiety, but social anxiety correlated negatively with fixation on the eye region. LimitationsOur sample was made up of Psychology undergraduates, and this may have had an influence on gaze behavior towards the eye region. ConclusionFixation on the eye region is not a valid measure of empathy in high social anxiety, possibly due to systematic eye-region avoidance.

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

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.

Prefrontal cortex hypoactivity distinguishes severe from mild-to-moderate social anxiety as revealed by a palm-sized near-infrared spectroscopy system.

The purpose of this study was to compare prefrontal cortex (PFC) activity among subjects with differing social anxiety (SA) severity levels to identify a possible biomarker for severe SA. Further, SA is generally under-diagnosed, so we examined if such measurements could be acquired conveniently, non-invasively, and at low cost using a portable near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) system. We classified 96 participants into three groups based on Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (LSAS) total score: Low SA (LSA, n = 40), Moderate SA (MSA, n = 39), and High SA (HSA, n = 17). We compared the prefrontal hemodynamic responses among LSAS severity groups during a verbal fluency task using a palm-sized NIRS system. The HSA group exhibited a significantly lower hemodynamic response in the left PFC compared to LSA and MSA groups, whereas there was no significant difference between LSA and MSA groups. There was also no significant difference in the right PFC hemodynamic response among groups. Differences in the severity of SA symptoms may be related to the left PFC function. Low PFC activity during specific cognitive tasks may provide a biomarker for distinguishing severe from mild/moderate SA symptoms to guide subsequent therapeutic decisions.

Distinguishing selective mutism and social anxiety in children: a multi-method study.

Selective mutism (SM) is an anxiety disorder in which a child fails to speak in some situations (e.g., school) despite the ability to speak in other situations (e.g., home). Some work has conceptualized SM as a variant of social anxiety disorder (SAD) characterized by higher levels of social anxiety. Here, we empirically tested this hypothesis to see whether there were differences in social anxiety (SA) between SM and SAD across behavioral, psychophysiological, self-, parent-, and teacher-report measures. Participants included 158 children (Mage = 8.76years, SD = 3.23) who were classified into three groups: children with SM and who were also highly socially anxious (SM + HSA; n = 48), highly socially anxious children without SM (HSA; n = 48), and control children (n = 62). Children participated in a videotaped self-presentation task, following which observed SA behaviors were coded, and salivary cortisol reactivity was measured. We also collected child, parent, and teacher reports of children's trait SA symptoms. The SM + HSA and HSA groups had similar observed non-verbal SA behavior, cortisol reactivity, and trait SA symptom levels according to parent and child reports, but SM + HSA children had significantly higher SA according to teacher report and observer-rated verbal SA behavior relative to the HSA group. As expected, control children had lower cortisol reactivity and SA across all measures relative to the other groups. Although SM and SAD in children share many similarities, SM may be characterized by greater SA in certain social contexts (e.g., school) and is distinguishable from SAD on behavioral measures of verbal SA.

Time course of attentional bias in social anxiety: The effects of spatial frequencies and individual threats.

Hypervigilance and attentional bias to threat faces with low-spatial-frequency (LSF) information have been found in individuals with social anxiety. The vigilance-avoidance hypothesis posits that socially anxious individuals exhibit initial vigilance and later avoidance to threatening cues. However, the temporal dynamics of these two processes in response to various LSF threats in social anxiety remain unclear. In the current study, we presented faces containing anger, disgust, and fear in high and low spatial frequencies and compared the neural correlates with sensory perception and attention in individuals with high versus low social anxiety (HSA/LSA, n=24). A visual search task was used to investigate the attentional effects of threats and spatial frequencies, and event-related potentials, particularly, the visual components of P1 and P250, were measured to index visual perceptual and attentional processes, respectively. We found that HSA individuals showed pronounced P1 and reduced P250 to LSF (vs. HSF) faces, regardless of emotion type, suggesting a general pattern of initial vigilance and later avoidance to LSF faces in social anxiety. Furthermore, while LSA individuals showed enhanced P250 to both fear and disgust (vs. neutral) faces, HSA individuals showed pronounced P250 to disgust faces alone. Our results, thus, elucidate the temporal profile of early vigilance and later avoidance in social anxiety, highlighting its broad implication for all faces and predominance in the low spatial frequency. Considering individual threats, our results demonstrate specific attentional avoidance of fear faces in social anxiety.

Mnemonic discrimination and social anxiety: the role of state anxiety

ABSTRACT The Mnemonic Similarity Task (MST) measures mnemonic discrimination, or the ability to correctly identify new stimuli from highly similar, old stimuli. Poor mnemonic discrimination is a potential risk or maintenance factor for anxiety, and recent studies suggest state affect may moderate relations between mnemonic discrimination and trait anxiety. No studies have evaluated mnemonic discrimination in specific subtypes of anxiety or with clinically relevant stressors. This preregistered study evaluated the role of social anxiety and the anticipation of a future speech on MST performance. Participants with high (n = 66) and low (n = 64) levels of social anxiety were randomly assigned to a stressor condition or a control condition prior to the MST. State anxiety was measured throughout the study. Results did not indicate significant effects of trait (high vs. low social anxiety) or state anxiety (stressor condition vs. control condition) on mnemonic discrimination. Results are compared with previous research and implications and future directions are discussed.

Attention allocation to subliminally presented affective faces in high and low social anxiety

Attention bias to affective stimuli, particularly threatening stimuli, has been well documented, with attention bias to affective faces often reported in populations with social anxiety (SA). However, inconsistencies exist in the literature regarding the direction of the bias, with some studies reporting a bias to attend toward social threat, and others reporting a bias to avoid social threat. This variability in the attention bias literature could be related to fluctuations in how attentional resources are allocated toward social stimuli over time. This study aimed to isolate early processing of affective faces using a backward masking paradigm in participants with high and low levels of subclinical SA. We used prepulse inhibition (PPI) of startle to index the amount of early attention allocated to masked affective faces. There was greater PPI to masked angry faces compared to neutral faces across all participants, suggesting that more attention was allocated to threatening faces. This effect was similar across face genders and participant SA levels. There was also a trend for more attention to be allocated to masked affective faces (angry and happy) compared to neutral faces across all participants. These findings demonstrate that attention bias to subliminal affect, and threat specifically, may not be modulated by subclinical levels of SA at very early stages of attention processing.

Text message safety behavior reduction for social anxiety: A randomized controlled trial.

Cognitive models of social anxiety disorder propose that maladaptive safety behaviors (SBs; i.e., behaviors intended to avoid, prevent, or manage threat) play an important maintaining role in the disorder. Though targeting these behaviors for elimination is one component of contemporary cognitive-behavioral therapies for social anxiety, it has rarely been examined as a specific treatment strategy, and, to our knowledge, it has not yet been examined in isolation as an intervention for social anxiety. The current study evaluated an SB reduction intervention for social anxiety that consisted of brief text message reminders. Individuals with elevated social anxiety (N = 94) were recruited from across the United States and randomized to receive one of two 1-month text message interventions consisting of 16 text message reminders to avoid SBs or focus on the present. Symptoms were assessed at pre- and posttreatment, as well as at 1-month follow-up. Both treatments were associated with substantial symptom reduction. Compared to the present-focused text message condition, SB elimination led to lower SB frequency at posttreatment (sr² = .044, p = .048) and lower social anxiety at follow-up (sr² = .096, p = .005). These preliminary findings provide novel evidence for the importance of SBs in social anxiety and suggest text message SB reduction may be an effective, highly accessible intervention for individuals with social anxiety. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Electrophysiological Measures of Visual Working Memory in Social Anxiety.

Socially anxious individuals are very sensitive to threatening information in the environment, so visual working memory (VWM) is of great significance for them. However, the influence of social anxiety on VWM is unclear. In the present study, we aimed to investigate the VWM in individuals with social anxiety using electrophysiological techniques. Event-related potentials (ERPs) of high socially anxious (HSA) individuals and low socially anxious (LSA) individuals were recorded during a change-detection task with two memory conditions (two and four items). Electrophysiological results indicated that compared with the LSA individuals, the HSA individuals had significantly more active contralateral delay activity (CDA) in condition of memorizing four items. However, there was no significant difference between the HSA and LSA groups in response accuracy in the conditions memorizing two and four items. From the electrophysiological results, individuals with high social anxiety could maintain more information in VWM. However, maybe anxiety consumes the available cognitive resources to compensate for the supposed to be impaired effective performance, so that individuals with high social anxiety perform the same as individuals with low social anxiety in terms of behavioral outcomes.

On-line personalized feedback intervention for negative affect and cannabis: A pilot randomized controlled trial.

Cannabis is the most commonly used illicit substance and many users report difficulty quitting. Situations involving stress and negative affect are the most difficult in which to abstain during quit/reduction attempts. Further, cannabis users with elevated social anxiety experience greater cannabis-related impairment than individuals with more normative levels of social anxiety. Yet, although most persons with cannabis-related problems are interested in quitting and endorse negative emotional symptoms, the vast majority do not seek in-person treatment. Thus, the current study tested the utility of an online personalized feedback intervention (PFI) that integrates feedback regarding cannabis with strategies to manage negative affect (PFI-NAC). Current (past month) cannabis using undergraduates (who used cannabis weekly, on average) were randomly assigned to the 1-session PFI-NAC (n = 37) or an assessment-only control (n = 26) and completed a 2-week follow-up assessment. After controlling for baseline negative affect and cannabis use frequency, social anxiety interacted with condition to predict follow-up cannabis use frequency. Specifically, among those with moderate or high levels of social anxiety, those in PFI-NAC reported less use at follow up than controls; this was not the case among those with lower social anxiety. Results of this pilot study indicate a 1-session intervention that teaches simultaneously teaching skills to manage negative affect and cannabis may benefit some cannabis users with moderate to high social anxiety. Future work with larger samples and a wider range of cannabis users, with longer follow-up assessments, are important next steps. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Neural correlates of negative expectancy and impaired social feedback processing in social anxiety.

Social anxiety has been associated with abnormalities in cognitive processing in the literature, manifesting as various cognitive biases. To what extent these biases interrupt social interactions remains largely unclear. This study used the Social Judgment Paradigm that could separate the expectation and experience stages of social feedback processing. Event-related potentials (ERPs) in these two stages were recorded to detect the effect of social anxiety that might not be reflected by behavioral data. Participants were divided into two groups according to their social anxiety level. Participants in the high social anxiety (HSA) group were more likely to predict that they would be socially rejected by peers than did their low social anxiety (LSA) counterparts (i.e. the control group). Compared to the ERP data of the LSA group, the HSA group showed: (a) a larger P1 component to social cues (peer faces) prior to social feedback presentation, possibly indicating an attention bias; (b) a difference in feedback-related negativity amplitude between unexpected social acceptance and unexpected social rejection, possibly indicating an expectancy bias; and (c) a diminished sensitivity of the P3 amplitude to social feedback valence (be accepted/be rejected), possibly indicating an experience bias. These results could help understand the cognitive mechanisms that comprise and maintain social anxiety.

Context Matters for the Socially Anxious: Moderating Role of Drinking Context on Alcohol Outcome Expectancies

Background: Moderating effects of alcohol outcome expectancies (AOE) on the social anxiety (SA)-alcohol misuse relationship are mixed. This may be explained by differential relationships between SA and context-specific AOE. Gender may further moderate these associations, as it influences SA, AOE, and drinking behaviors. Objectives: To examine the moderating role of drinking context (i.e. convivial, negative coping, or personal-intimate) and gender on the relationships between SA and three AOE (i.e. tension reduction, sociability, and sexuality). Methods: Participants (n = 436, Mage=19.32, 72% female, 85.8% White) were 218 undergraduates with elevated SA (high SA group) and a gender-matched low SA group (n = 218) drawn from a larger undergraduate sample (N = 1,015). Participants completed three versions of an AOE measure, differing by drinking context considered. Results: A significant SA group x context x gender interaction was found for tension reduction AOE; compared to men, women in the low SA group reported greater tension reduction AOE in negative coping contexts. Significant SA group and context main effects suggest that sociability and sexuality AOE are endorsed more in the high (vs. low) SA group, and in convivial and personal-intimate compared to negative coping contexts. Conclusions/Importance: Tension reduction AOE vary depending on the drinking context, SA, and gender. Assessment of AOE in specific drinking contexts may help to identify which individuals may be at greatest risk for alcohol misuse and help inform treatment of SA-related problem drinking.

Involuntary autobiographical memories and future projections in social anxiety

ABSTRACTIntrusive involuntary memories and images are a cardinal phenomenon in a range of psychological disorders, but not systematically examined in social anxiety. We examined potential biases upon generating involuntary versus voluntary memories and future projections in individuals with high and low levels of social anxiety. Participants recorded involuntary and voluntary autobiographical events, and their associated emotional response in a structured mental time travel diary. High social anxiety was associated with more intense anxiety and embarrassment and greater use of a range of emotion regulation strategies upon generating all types of autobiographical events. Involuntary (versus voluntary) memories and future events were associated with a heightened emotional response independent of social anxiety, and memories were associated with more embarrassment than imagined future events. The effects of high versus low social anxiety and involuntary versus voluntary generation process were independent from each other. The findings have implications for affective and cognitive models of involuntary memories and future projections in emotional disorders.

Research on Attention Bias Characteristics under the Consciousness Threshold of Individuals with Social Anxiety

In this study, the improved masking detection paradigm was adopted to form stimulus picture pairs with pictures of different emotional faces and household items, to explore the attention preference characteristics of individuals with social anxiety under the threshold of consciousness. The results showed that the threshold of consciousness, under the condition of consistency, detects the target in the reaction on the negative emotions. Face images are much smaller than to detect the target in household items to the reaction time on the images, and also appear less than to detect the target in the reaction on the positive mood face images, namely high social anxiety group compared with low social anxiety, attention to negative emotional faces that exist. The results are consistent with the alertness model in the cognitive processing theory model of social anxiety.