Social anxiety is related to reduced face gaze during a naturalistic social interaction

ABSTRACT

Background:

Social anxiety has long been related to reduced eye contact, and this feature is seen as a causal and a maintaining factor of social anxiety disorder. The present research adds to the literature by investigating the relationship between social anxiety and visual avoidance of faces in a reciprocal face-to-face conversation, while taking into account two aspects of conversations as potential moderating factors: conversational role and level of intimacy.

Method:

Eighty-five female students (17–25 years) completed the Leibowitz Social Anxiety Scale and had a face-to-face getting-acquainted conversation with a female confederate. We alternated conversational role (talking versus listening) and manipulated intimacy of the topics (low versus high). Participants’ gaze behavior was registered with Tobii eye-tracking glasses. Three dependent measures were extracted regarding fixations on the face of the confederate: total duration, proportion of fixations, and mean duration.

Results:

The results revealed that higher levels of social anxiety were associated with reduced face gaze on all three measures. The relation with total fixation duration was stronger for low intimate topics. The relation with mean fixation duration was stronger during listening than during speaking.

Conclusion:

The results highlight the importance of studying gaze behavior in a naturalistic social interaction.

KEYWORDS:

• Eye-tracking
• social anxiety
• face gaze
• face-to-face conversation
• self-disclosure

Acknowledgements

The first author is supported by the China Scholarship Council (CSC). The authors wish to thank Maud de Leeuw, Odile de Jong, and Olivia Gray for assistance with collecting the data.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available upon request (for scientific purposes) in Dataverse.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Jiemiao Chen: Conceptualization, Investigation, Data curation, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft. Esther van den Bos: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Supervision, Writing – review & Editing. Julian D. Karch: Formal analysis, Writing – review & Editing. P. Michiel Westenberg: Conceptualization, Methodology, Supervision, Project administration, Writing – review & Editing.

Notes

1 The low response rate was largely due to regulations to prevent the spread of Covid-19. The data were collected between March 2020 and April 2021. From March to July 2020 no lab sessions could be scheduled with participants who had completed the pre-screening as part of an online survey, because all labs were closed. When the labs reopened, people were still encouraged to minimize social contact and education remained completely online. This reduced students’ willingness to participate in lab sessions at the university.

2 In the original version, participants were randomly assigned to either closeness-generating conversations (intimate topics) or small-talk conversations (general topics). In this study, we combined the two types of conversation into one continuous conversation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Chinese Government Scholarship.