Elsevier

Biological Psychiatry

Volume 59, Issue 7, 1 April 2006, Pages 664-666
Biological Psychiatry

Brief report
Anticipation of Public Speaking in Virtual Reality Reveals a Relationship Between Trait Social Anxiety and Startle Reactivity

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2005.09.015Get rights and content

Background

Startle reflex modification has become valuable to the study of fear and anxiety, but few studies have explored startle reactivity in socially threatening situations.

Methods

Healthy participants ranging in trait social anxiety entered virtual reality (VR) that simulates standing center-stage in front of an audience to anticipate giving a speech and count backward. We measured startle and autonomic reactivity during anticipation of both tasks inside VR after a single baseline recording outside VR.

Results

Trait social anxiety, but not general trait anxiety, was positively correlated with startle before entering VR and most clearly during speech anticipation inside VR. Speech anticipation inside VR also elicited stronger physiologic responses relative to anticipation of counting.

Conclusions

Under social-evaluative threat, startle reactivity showed robust relationships with fear of negative evaluation, a central aspect of social anxiety and clinical social phobia. Context-specific startle modification may be an endophenotype for subtypes of pathological anxiety.

Section snippets

Participants

Forty-five healthy participants (24 women) were recruited through local (college) newspapers, with the following ethnic backgrounds: 64% Caucasian/non-Hispanic, 7% Hispanic, 16% African American, 4% Asian American, and 9% Other/Unknown (age 20–47, mean 28.7). Exclusion criteria included any current psychiatric diagnosis per Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV (First et al 1995) and current use of psychoactive medication (per self-report). Informed consent approved by the National Institute

Relationships Among Self-Report Measures and Physiology

Spearman correlations (α = .05) were computed for SSPS, FNE, and STAI-Trait scores and mean startle responses, HR, and SCL during Baseline, Speech, and Count (Table 1). Startle responses were moderately correlated with FNE, SSPS-Negative, and SSPS-Positive during Speech and to some extent during Count and Baseline. The STAI-Trait did not correlate with startle. Startle responses were not correlated with subjective state anxiety in any condition (ps > .20). No correlations were found between FNE

Discussion

We investigated effects of anticipating public speaking on physiologic reactivity across individuals with high and low social anxiety. Two main findings emerged. First, startle reactivity was linearly related to predisposition to experience anxiety in social-evaluative situations, as measured by FNE and SSPS, but was not associated with general trait anxiety. Startle showed robust increases during anticipation of both tasks inside VR, particularly during speech anticipation, relative to

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