The time-course of attention to emotional faces in social phobia

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Abstract

This study investigated the time-course of attentional bias in socially phobic (SP) and non-phobic (NP) adults. Participants viewed angry and happy faces paired with neutral faces (i.e., face-face pairs) and angry, happy and neutral faces paired with household objects (i.e., face-object pairs) for 5000 ms. Eye movement (EM) was measured throughout to assess biases in early and sustained attention. Attentional bias occurred only for face-face pairs. SP adults were vigilant for angry faces relative to neutral faces in the first 500 ms of the 5000 ms exposure, relative to NP adults. SP adults were also vigilant for happy faces over 500 ms, although there were no group-based differences in attention to happy-neutral face pairs. There were no group differences in attention to faces throughout the remainder of the exposure. Results suggest that social phobia is characterised by early vigilance for social cues with no bias in subsequent processing.

Section snippets

The time-course of attention to emotional faces in social phobia

Research has increasingly emphasized the role of emotion in regulating attention to fear-relevant stimuli (Öhman, Flykt, & Lundqvist, 2000). In the context of social anxiety, it is generally assumed that socially anxious individuals are biased toward selective processing of social threat cues, known as attentional bias (Bögels & Mansell, 2004). However studies have also shown that socially anxious individuals may avoid processing social threat (Chen et al., 2002, Mansell et al., 1999, Rinck and

Participants

Two groups of participants were recruited for this study, a clinical sample and non-clinical controls. All participants were assessed by graduate students in clinical psychology using the Anxiety Disorders Interview Schedule for DSM-IV (ADIS-IV; DiNardo, Brown, & Barlow, 1994). Data from our laboratory (overlapping with this sample) indicate a moderate to strong interrater reliability for diagnoses of anxiety and mood disorders, including a very high reliability for a diagnosis of social phobia

Descriptive measures

Table 1 shows demographics and mean questionnaire scores for socially phobic (SP) and non-phobic (NP) adults. Groups did not differ significantly in terms of age F(1, 86) = 1.51, p > 0.05, ns, or sex ratio χ2 (1, N = 87) = 0.29, p > 0.05, ns. The highest level of education achieved by the socially phobic sample was as follows: 27.1% secondary school, 28.8% trade certificate/diploma and 42.2% bachelor degree or higher. For the control sample education was 21.4% secondary school, 14.3% certificate/diploma,

Discussion

The main findings of this study can be summarized as follows. Social phobia was associated with vigilance for social threat in early, but not sustained, attentional processing but only when compared against other faces. When presented with angry-neutral face pairs for 5000 ms, socially phobic adults made a greater proportion of fixations toward angry faces in the first 500 ms of the stimulus presentation, relative to non-phobic adults. This bias was restricted to the early stages of attentional

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