Attention allocation in social anxiety during a speech

Abstract

Cognitive models assume that social anxiety is associated with and maintained by biased information processing, leading to change in attention allocation, which can be measured by examining eye movement. However, little is known about the distribution of attention among positive, neutral and negative stimuli during a social task and the relative importance of positive versus negative biases in social anxiety. In this study, eye movement, subjective state anxiety and psychophysiology of individuals with high trait social anxiety (HSA) and low trait social anxiety (LSA) were measured during a speech task with a pre-recorded audience. The HSA group showed longer total fixation on negative stimuli and shorter total fixation on positive stimuli compared to the LSA group. We observed that the LSA group shifted attention away from negative stimuli, whereas the HSA group showed no differential attention allocation. The total duration of fixation on negative stimuli predicted subjective anxiety ratings. These results point to a negative bias as well as a lack of a positive bias in HSA individuals during social threat.

Keywords:

• Social anxiety
• Eye movement
• Attention allocation
• Social stimuli
• Speech task

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank and acknowledge Caifu Hong, Dr Elizabath A. Mundy, Dongjun He, Hongbo Yu, Yin Yang, Dr Fang Fang and Dr Xiaolin Zhou for their kindly assistance, guidance and support during the development of this study and in the writing of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by National Science Foundation of China [Project 31170991] and by China Scholarship Council awarded to the first author. Dr Hofmann receives support from NIH/NCCIH (R01AT007257), NIH/NIMH (R01MH099021, R34MH099311, R34MH086668, R21MH102646, R21MH101567, K23MH100259), and the Department of the Army for work unrelated to the studies reported in this article.