Event-related potentials to schematic faces in social phobia

Abstract

Social phobia has been associated with an attentional bias for angry faces. This study aimed at further characterising this attentional bias by investigating reaction times, heart rates, and ERPs while social phobics, spider phobics, and controls identified either the colour or the emotional quality of angry, happy, or neutral schematic faces. The emotional expression of angry faces did not interfere with the processing of their colour in social phobics, and heart rate, N170 amplitude and parietal late positive potentials (LPPs) of these subjects were also no different from those of non-phobic subjects. However, social phobics showed generally larger P1 amplitudes than non-phobic controls with spider phobic subjects in between. No general threat advantage for angry faces was found. All groups identified neutral schematic faces faster and showed larger late positive amplitudes to neutral than to emotional faces. Furthermore, in all groups the N170 was modulated by the emotional quality of faces. This effect was most pronounced in the emotion identification task.

Acknowledgements

This study was funded by grant Mi265/6-1 of the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) awarded to WHRM. We would also like to thank the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes) for awarding a doctoral grant to ITK.

Thanks are also due to Sandra Riske, Alexander Mohr, and Katharina Stößel for their assistance in conducting the study.

Notes

¹It should be kept in mind that the colour identification task may have been easier and less complex than the emotion identification task. Thus, any task effects in this and subsequent dependent variables may reflect response differences rather than processing differences between the tasks. However, comparing the two tasks is not the main focus of the present study.