New findings suggest that people with social anxiety pay more attention to negative social information — but only if they have low attentional control. For participants with greater control over their attention, social anxiety vulnerability was not associated with an attentional bias toward negative social information. The findings were published in Cognition and Emotion.
Cognitive theories of social anxiety disorder (SAD) suggest that an attentional bias toward negative social information is one mechanism that helps maintain the disorder. However, the findings related to this theory have been inconsistent, suggesting some nuance to the effect.
Study authors Mahdi Mazidi (@MahdiMazidi) and his colleagues proposed that attentional control might moderate this link between social anxiety and selective attention. The researchers theorized that the ability to strategically divert one’s attention away from distraction and toward goal-relevant information might attenuate the relationship between social anxiety and selective attention to negative social stimuli.
“I was interested in this topic because of its potential to enhance the effectiveness of a new approach to anxiety interventions known as Cognitive Bias Modification (CBM),” explained Mazidi, a PhD student in the Centre for the Advancement of Research on Emotion (CARE) at the University of Western Australia.
“CBM refers to procedures designed to directly change the biased patterns of information processing known to be associated with elevated levels of anxiety, such as a biased tendency to allocate attention to negative information or a biased tendency to interpret ambiguous situations as negative. CBM interventions can be delivered remotely through the internet, and have the capacity to provide cost-effective and convenient alternative or complementary interventions to face-to-face therapies, with applicability to a wide range of clinical problems.”
“These interventions have shown some promising results, but to maximize their effects greater understanding of the underlying targeted mechanisms is required, which was what motivated me to conduct the current experiment,” Mazidi said.
To explore this, Mazidi and team conducted an experiment among a final sample of 89 US residents with an average age of 38. The participants completed an assessment of social anxiety symptoms and then partook in an attentional control task that involved responding to and identifying probes on a screen. Certain blocks of trials assessed their level of attentional control, and a separate set of trials assessed selective attention to negative social stimuli. Selective attention was measured by computing how fast participants were to discriminate probes presented in the location of angry faces versus happy faces.
Two important findings emerged. For one, students with more social anxiety symptoms showed increased attention to the angry faces. This is in line with cognitive theories suggesting that a bias toward negative social information plays a key role in social anxiety disorder.
Next, and in line with the researchers’ hypothesis, a moderation analysis revealed that attentional control moderated this link between social anxiety and attentional responding. Only among participants with low attentional control was social anxiety associated with increased attention toward angry faces. Among participants with strong attentional control, this relationship was nonexistent.
“Biased allocation of attention to negative social information has been shown to contribute to greater levels of social anxiety,” Mazidi told PsyPost. “In the current study, we found that individuals with relatively poor attentional control are more vulnerable to exhibiting biased allocation of attention to negative social information. Therefore, a take-home message could be that people might reduce their vulnerability to having this bias by improving their attentional control. Doing meditation, improving sleep quality, exercising, having a healthy diet, and spending time in the nature all have been shown capable of improving attentional control.”
Mazidi and colleagues discuss a possible explanation for this moderation effect. Increased social anxiety might make it more likely for negative social stimuli to automatically capture attention, and the ability to strategically control one’s attention might interrupt this process. This means that the link between social anxiety and attentional bias is more likely to be present among people who are less able to control their attention.
The study authors note that their research was conducted among a non-clinical sample, and it is unclear whether these findings would be seen among individuals with a diagnosis of social anxiety disorder (SAD). They say their findings suggest that social anxiety is driven by more than a negative bias toward social information since some participants with high social anxiety did not show selective attention to the angry faces.
“A limitation of the previous studies that examined the same question was measuring attentional control using self-report measures,” Mazidi noted. “However, recently there have been serious doubts about the validity of self-report measures often used to measure attentional control as some researchers suggested that these measures reflect one’s beliefs about their attentional control capacity and not their actual attentional control. Our study overcame this limitation through using a performance-based approach for assessing attentional control.”
“A next step in this area of research is to investigate the potential benefit of assessing and considering attentional control in cognitive bias modification programs designed to reduce social anxiety through reducing biased attention to negative social information,” Mazidi explained. “Researchers are increasingly acknowledging the benefits of psychological interventions that are more personalized and tailored according to the unique psychological and cognitive profiles of individuals, and attention control may be a critical factor to be considered in these intervention programs.”
The study, “Attentional control moderates the relationship between social anxiety and selective attentional responding to negative social information: evidence from objective measures of attentional processes”, was authored by Mahdi Mazidi, Ben Grafton, Julian Basanovic, and Colin MacLeod.
