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