Time course of selective attention to face regions in social anxiety: eye-tracking and computational modelling

ABSTRACT

We investigated the time course of selective attention to face regions during judgment of dis/approval by low (LSA) and high (HSA) social anxiety undergraduates (with clinical levels on questionnaire measures). The viewers’ gaze direction was assessed and the stimulus visual saliency of face regions was computed, for video-clips displaying dynamic facial expressions. Social anxiety was related to perception of disapproval from faces with an ambiguous smile (i.e. with non-happy eyes), but not those with congruent happy eyes and a smile. HSA observers selectively looked earlier at the eye region, whereas LSA ones preferentially looked at the smiling mouth. Consistently, gaze allocation was less related to visual saliency of the smile for HSA than for LSA viewers. The attentional bias towards the less salient eye region – thus opposing the automatic capture by the smile – suggests that it is strategically driven in HSA individuals, possibly aimed at detecting negative evaluators.

GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS:

• Social anxiety
• facial expression
• perception of disapproval
• visual saliency
• eye movements

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Manuel G. Calvo http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1083-9929

Notes

1 For details, see Electronic Supplemental Materials ESM_1.

2 For details, see ESM_1 and ESM_2.

3 The raw data are shown in ESM_3.

4 There was an understandable delay between the smiling mouth saliency advantage onset (∼600 ms) and the fixation density advantage onset for LSA participants (∼867 ms). Such a delay fits within the well-known relationship between covert attention (prompted by saliency) and overt attention (fixations) mechanisms (Borji & Itti, 2013), whereby covert attention shifts precede overt saccades (≥150 ms). Interestingly, the delay was equivalent for HSA viewers, but the saliency-fixation relationship was stronger for LSA viewers.

5 Both groups looked earlier and longer at the left rather than the right eye region (from the viewer’s perspective), thus reflecting the typical leftward gaze bias (Schurgin et al., 2014).

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Secretaría de Estado de Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación under Grant PSI2014-54720-P.