Early information processing biases in social anxiety

Abstract

Considerable controversy persists regarding the nature of threat-related attention biases in social anxiety. Previous studies have not considered how variations in the temporal and energetic dimensions of affective stimulus delivery interact with anxiety-related individual differences to predict biased attention. We administered a visual dot-probe task, using faces that varied in affective intensity (mild, moderate, strong) and presentation rate (100, 500, 1,250 ms) to a selected sample. The high, compared to the low, socially anxious group showed vigilance towards angry faces and emotionally ambiguous faces more generally during rapid (100 ms) presentations. By 1,250 ms, there was only a non-specific motor slowing associated with angry faces in the high socially anxious group. Findings suggest the importance of considering both chronometric and energetic dimensions of affective stimuli when examining anxiety-related attention biases. Future studies should consider using designs that more closely replicate aspects of real-world interaction to study processing biases in socially anxious populations.

Keywords:

• Social anxiety
• Attention
• Threat-related bias
• Emotion processing

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research was supported by a Vanier doctoral scholarship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) awarded to VM under the direction of LS and grants from NSERC and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) awarded to LS.

We would like to thank Xiaoqing Gao for help in creating the experimental stimuli. We also wish to thank Laurel Pickel, Maria Ierullo and Sue McKee for their help with data collection and entry.

Notes

¹An interesting question concerns the degree to which vigilance for angry faces may manifest as a function of hyperreactivity in a generalised fear system, not necessarily one that is dedicated solely to social fears (see also Mansell et al., 1999). Indeed, we found in our sample a significant association between a self-report index of a generic behavioural inhibition system (BIS; Carver & White, 1994) and attention bias for angry faces presented at 100 ms (r=.41, p=.02), but not the other durations. The behavioural inhibition system is presumed to respond to cues of punishment (including, but not limited to, social cues) and to be grounded in septo-hippocampal and amygdala brain circuits. A range of anxiety disorder may share in common the increased excitability of a generic fear-related circuit.