People with higher levels of social anxiety tend to have a harder time shifting their attention away from an angry-looking face towards a happy-looking face, according to new research published in the journal Emotion.
The study provides evidence that socially anxious individuals do not suffer from a general deficit in attentional control. Rather, they only display atypical attentional processing patterns in particular situations.
“We were interested in this topic for a number of reasons. Individuals who have high levels of social anxiety can experience high levels of distress and impairment in their social and occupational functioning,” explained study author Stephanie Goodhew, a senior lecturer and co-director of the Visual Cognition Lab at the Australian National University.
“There is clear evidence that such individuals have a tendency to deploy their visual attention in ways that differ measurably from those with lower levels of social anxiety. For instance, socially anxious individuals tend to orient their attention toward stimuli they consider threatening (e.g., a face displaying an angry expression) more so than to less threatening stimuli (e.g., a face displaying a neutral expression).”
“It is thought that such biased attention toward threatening stimuli may create or maintain the anxiety over time. However, to date, this attentional tendency has typically been tested under conditions in which these stimuli are presented while participants are not engaged in any other task.”
In their new study, which included 110 participants, the researchers used a computerized dot-probe task to examine how social anxiety was related to attentional control.
Goodhew and her colleagues improved upon the dot-probe task used in previous studies by instructing the participants “to orient their attention toward a particular stimulus on each trial, and then assessing how much other types of stimuli (e.g., an angry face) presented at the same time affected participants’ ability to follow the instruction,” she explained.
During the dot-probe task, the participants were presented with a cue word on a computer screen, such as “happy” or “angry,” and were asked to direct their attention toward that particular facial expression once it appeared. The participants then briefly viewed a blank screen with a fixation cross in the middle, before two faces appeared side-by-side on the screen.
After a few moments, the faces disappeared and then a letter appeared where one of the pictures had been. The participants were told to press a computer key to indicate the letter as quickly as possible. A fast response time to a letter that appeared in the place of a face indicated a bias towards that face.
“We measured participants’ social anxiety, and our sample showed a range of scores from low levels through to high levels of anxiety. We found that individuals with high levels of social anxiety were selectively impaired in orienting their attention toward happy faces when an angry face was shown at the same time,” Goodhew told PsyPost.
“However, their ability to orient toward a happy face shown concurrently with a neutral face, or an angry face shown concurrently with a happy face, was equivalent to those with low levels of social anxiety. This shows that individuals with high levels of social anxiety do not have a general deficit in their ability to use their attention to follow instructions. Instead, threatening facial expressions seem to selectively impair this ability by distracting socially anxious participants from the task at hand.”
“This study shows that individuals with high levels of social anxiety are distracted by threatening stimuli (e.g., angry faces) that aren’t relevant to their current task. The identical stimuli didn’t have this effect on individuals with lower levels of anxiety. This shows how the identical stimuli can affect people differently depending on their individual characteristics, such as tendency to experience anxiety. An angry face is especially threatening to someone with social anxiety,” Goodhew explained.
The study, “The Effect of Social Anxiety on Top-Down Attentional Orienting to Emotional Faces“, was authored by Hannah L. Delchau, Bruce K. Christensen, Ottmar V. Lipp, and Stephanie C. Goodhew.