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时间过程视角下社交焦虑个体的注视加工特征*
The Gaze Processing Characteristics of Individuals with Social Anxiety from a Temporal Perspective
基于时间过程视角系统分析社交焦虑个体在注视加工过程中的异常表现，重点聚焦于注视感知、注视过程及注视线索效应三个方面的特征。结果表明，SA个体在注视感知上表现出更高的敏感性，注视锥范围显著扩大，更倾向于认为他人在注视自己。在注视过程中，SA个体表现出明显的回避倾向及注意维持和注意脱离困难，揭示了其注意控制能力的缺陷。然而，在注视线索效应方面，研究尚未发现社交焦虑个体表现出显著差异。结合信息加工理论、注意控制理论及警觉-回避理论，提出了基于时间过程划分的注视加工阶段模型，强调知觉、注意和情绪的动态变化过程。尝试整合现有研究中存在的不同发现，为理解社交焦虑个体注视加工特征提供了一个初步的解释视角。未来研究可进一步探讨社交焦虑对注视加工的影响机制，并探索将注视信息干预应用于实践的可能性，以加深对社交焦虑个体认知和行为特征的理解，提升临床干预的针对性和有效性。
Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is a prevalent mental health condition characterized by an intense fear of social situations and of negative evaluations from others. The fear of being “watched” or scrutinized by others is one among myriad symptoms of SAD. This study systematically analyzes abnormal gaze processing characteristics in individuals with SAD from a process-oriented perspective. Gaze processing is divided into three distinct dimensions: gaze perception (cone of direct gaze, CoDG), gaze process (initial orienting, attentional maintenance, and disengagement), and the gaze cueing effect (GCE). This approach is designed to follow an integrated perspective regarding the cognitive and behavioral mechanisms underlying gaze processing abnormalities in individuals with SAD.
The human gaze plays a crucial role in social interactions, functioning as a key nonverbal cue in the formation and regulation of interpersonal relationships. For individuals with SAD, eye contact often becomes a perceived threat rather than a social connector. They are more likely to interpret others’ gazes as negative evaluations, thereby exacerbating the anxiety response and reinforcing avoidance behaviors. In other words, gaze processing may create a self-sustaining cycle of symptoms in SAD.
Although gaze-processing anomalies are recognized as a key feature of SAD, existing studies have yielded conflicting findings. Some suggest heightened vigilance (hypervigilance) towards gaze stimuli while others report significant avoidance tendencies. These contradictory research outcomes suggest that gaze processing in SAD is a dynamic process that warrants examination across different temporal stages.
The present study uses the temporal progression framework of information processing theory, which posits that visual social information is processed through multiple dynamic stages, including perception, cognition, and behavioral response. Additionally, proponents of the attentional control theory argue that anxiety impairs the sustaining and shifting of attention. The vigilance-avoidance hypothesis and attention maintenance hypothesis further elucidate the nature of attention in individuals with SAD, in which hypervigilance to threat stimuli precipitates avoidance behavior. Taken together, these perspectives provide a comprehensive theoretical framework that supports the analysis of gaze-processing abnormalities in individuals with SAD, particularly their underlying cognitive and behavioral mechanisms.
This comprehensive review synthesizes empirical studies and theoretical models related to gaze processing in individuals with SAD, focusing on three main dimensions, including gaze perception (CoDG), gaze process (initial orienting, attentional maintenance, and disengagement), and the gaze cueing effect (GCE). Findings from eye-tracking studies, virtual reality interventions, and behavioral experiments are integrated to construct a cohesive theoretical framework that accounts for the dynamic nature of gaze processing in SAD.
Individuals with SAD are found to exhibit an expanded CoDG, indicating a heightened sensitivity to perceiving others’ gazes as directed at themselves, even erroneously. Socially anxious individuals are also more likely to interpret ambiguous gaze directions from virtual characters as direct, correlating with the severity of their anxiety symptoms. The presence of additional virtual characters in a social scenario expands the CoDG width, suggesting that increased social pressure exacerbates gaze-processing abnormalities in SAD.
In the gaze processing stage, individuals with SAD show no significant differences from healthy controls in the initial orienting phase under non-threatening conditions; to this effect, early automatic attention processes appear to remain intact. However, under conditions of high-pressure social evaluations, individuals with SAD display heightened vigilance towards threatening or positive facial stimuli. This highlights the influence of situational factors on attentional deployment.
During attentional maintenance, socially anxious individuals demonstrate marked difficulties in sustaining focus on specific stimuli. Eye-tracking studies have shown that individuals with SAD spend less time fixating on facial expressions, indicative of avoidance. This pattern grows more pronounced in dynamic, real-life interactions where social threats are more salient.
Inconsistencies in findings across different settings underscore the complexity of attentional processes in SAD. In the disengagement phase, socially anxious individuals exhibit either delayed withdrawal from threatening stimuli or, conversely, quicker shifts away from such stimuli depending on the experimental context. This dichotomy suggests that disengagement in SAD is influenced by multiple factors, including stimulus presentation duration and the nature of the social threat. These dynamics further complicate the understanding of attention control in SAD.
Contrary to our expectations, recent studies indicate that SAD does not significantly modulate the GCE. Research controlling for trait anxiety, depression, and autism found no substantial differences in the GCE between individuals with and without SAD when processing angry, fearful, and neutral facial expressions. However, these studies employed static facial stimuli, which potentially limits the ecological validity and detection of more nuanced effects of dynamic expressions on GCE.
Overall, the findings of this review indicate that gaze-processing abnormalities in SAD are not static but rather evolve through several distinct stages. Expanded CoDG and impaired attentional maintenance and disengagement underscore significant deficits in attention control among individuals with SAD, aligning with the attentional control theory. The lack of significant impact on the GCE suggests that while SAD is associated with attentional anomalies during active gaze processing, implicit gaze-cued attention shifts remain largely unaffected in afflicted individuals.
To account for these complexities, this study proposes a stage-based theoretical framework that delineates gaze perception, process, and effect stages. This model accounts for the dynamic nature of attention in SAD, in which early hypervigilance transitions into avoidance behavior and disengagement processes are inconsistently affected by contextual factors. This integrative approach reconciles previous contradictory findings by emphasizing the temporal nature and situational dependency of gaze-processing in socially anxious individuals.
Understanding the stage-specific gaze-processing abnormalities in SAD can inform the development of targeted clinical interventions. For instance, cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) regimens can be designed to include modules for improving attentional control during maintenance and disengagement phases. Virtual reality (VR) environments, which allow for controlled manipulation of social scenarios and facial expressions, can be utilized to enhance exposure and habituation to perceived social threats and thus reduce CoDG expansion and avoidance behavior. Attention Bias Modification (ABM) techniques can also be tailored to specific attentional deficits in separate gaze-processing stages. By fostering more adaptive gaze-related behavior and reducing the misinterpretation of social cues, these interventions can alleviate core symptoms of SAD while improving overall social functioning and quality-of-life for affected individuals.
In conclusion, this study underscores the intricate relationship between gaze-processing and social anxiety. Individuals with SAD exhibit dynamic abnormalities in gaze-processing that span perception, processing, and effect stages. By adopting a process-oriented framework, this research reconciles previous inconsistencies and secures a robust foundation for future theoretical and empirical investigations. Enhancing our understanding of these cognitive and behavioral mechanisms may not only advance the theoretical discourse on SAD but also pave the way for more effective, stage-specific clinical interventions. Ultimately, taking a more comprehensive approach holds promise for improving the social functioning and overall well-being of individuals grappling with SAD.
社交焦虑 / 注视加工 / 注视感知 / 注视过程 / 注视线索效应
social anxiety / gaze processing / gaze perception / gaze process / gaze cueing effect
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Despite the established relationship between social anxiety and attentional bias towards threat, a growing base of evidence suggests that social anxiety is additionally maintained by a deficit in the attentional processing of positive information. However, it remains unclear which component of attention is implicated in this deficit. Using eye movement-based measures and a novel attentional cuing methodology, the present study sought to investigate the presence of anxiety-linked bias in attentional engagement with, attentional disengagement from, and total fixation time to, socially relevant emotional stimuli in individuals diagnosed with social anxiety disorder, relative to non-socially anxious controls. Socially anxious individuals were found to exhibit faster attentional disengagement from positive stimuli, and reduced total fixation time to all emotional stimuli, relative to controls. Additionally for socially anxious individuals, lower total fixation times to positive stimuli were associated with higher levels of state anxiety. No differential pattern of engagement was evident between groups. We conclude that social anxiety is maintained in part by the aberrant processing of positive social stimuli.
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Fast and accurate judgment of whether another person is making eye contact or not is crucial for our social interaction. As affective states have been shown to influence social perceptions and judgments, we investigated the influence of observers' own affective states and trait anxiety on their eye contact judgments. In two experiments, participants were required to judge whether animated faces (Experiment 1) and real faces (Experiment 2) with varying gaze angles were looking at them or not. Participants performed the task in pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant odor conditions. The results from two experiments showed that eye contact judgments were not modulated by observers' affective state, yet participants with higher levels of social anxiety accepted a wider range of gaze deviations from the direct gaze as eye contact. We conclude that gaze direction judgments depend on individual differences in affective predispositions, yet they are not amenable to situational affective influences.
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Gaze is an important component of social interaction. The function, evolution and neurobiology of gaze processing are therefore of interest to a number of researchers. This review discusses the evolutionary role of social gaze in vertebrates (focusing on primates), and a hypothesis that this role has changed substantially for primates compared to other animals. This change may have been driven by morphological changes to the face and eyes of primates, limitations in the facial anatomy of other vertebrates, changes in the ecology of the environment in which primates live, and a necessity to communicate information about the environment, emotional and mental states. The eyes represent different levels of signal value depending on the status, disposition and emotional state of the sender and receiver of such signals. There are regions in the monkey and human brain which contain neurons that respond selectively to faces, bodies and eye gaze. The ability to follow another individual's gaze direction is affected in individuals with autism and other psychopathological disorders, and after particular localized brain lesions. The hypothesis that gaze following is "hard-wired" in the brain, and may be localized within a circuit linking the superior temporal sulcus, amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex is discussed.
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Attentional control theory is an approach to anxiety and cognition representing a major development of Eysenck and Calvo's (1992) processing efficiency theory. It is assumed that anxiety impairs efficient functioning of the goal-directed attentional system and increases the extent to which processing is influenced by the stimulus-driven attentional system. In addition to decreasing attentional control, anxiety increases attention to threat-related stimuli. Adverse effects of anxiety on processing efficiency depend on two central executive functions involving attentional control: inhibition and shifting. However, anxiety may not impair performance effectiveness (quality of performance) when it leads to the use of compensatory strategies (e.g., enhanced effort; increased use of processing resources). Directions for future research are discussed.
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In 2 experiments, the authors tested predictions from cognitive models of social anxiety regarding attentional biases for social and nonsocial cues by monitoring eye movements to pictures of faces and objects in high social anxiety (HSA) and low social anxiety (LSA) individuals. Under no-stress conditions (Experiment 1), HSA individuals initially directed their gaze toward neutral faces, relative to objects, more often than did LSA participants. However, under social-evaluative stress (Experiment 2), HSA individuals showed reduced biases in initial orienting and maintenance of gaze on faces (cf. objects) compared with the LSA group. HSA individuals were also relatively quicker to look at emotional faces than neutral faces but looked at emotional faces for less time, compared with LSA individuals, consistent with a vigilant-avoidant pattern of bias.(c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved.
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Recent studies have revealed significant cultural modulations on face scanning strategies, thereby challenging the notion of universality in face perception. Current findings are based on screen-based paradigms, which offer high degrees of experimental control, but lack critical characteristics common to social interactions (e.g., social presence, dynamic visual saliency), and complementary approaches are required. The current study used head-mounted eye tracking techniques to investigate the visual strategies for face scanning in British/Irish (in the UK) and Japanese adults (in Japan) who were engaged in dyadic social interactions with a local research assistant. We developed novel computational data pre-processing tools and data-driven analysis techniques based on Monte Carlo permutation testing. The results revealed significant cultural differences in face scanning during social interactions for the first time, with British/Irish participants showing increased mouth scanning and the Japanese group engaging in greater eye and central face looking. Both cultural groups further showed more face orienting during periods of listening relative to speaking, and during the introduction task compared to a storytelling game, thereby replicating previous studies testing Western populations. Altogether, these findings point to the significant role of postnatal social experience in specialised face perception and highlight the adaptive nature of the face processing system.
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Patients with social anxiety disorder suffer from pronounced fears in social situations. As gaze perception is crucial in these situations, we examined which factors influence the range of gaze directions where mutual gaze is experienced (the cone of gaze).The social stimulus was modified by changing the number of people (heads) present and the emotional expression of their faces. Participants completed a psychophysical task, in which they had to adjust the eyes of a virtual head to gaze at the edge of the range where mutual eye-contact was experienced.The number of heads affected the width of the gaze cone: the more heads, the wider the gaze cone. The emotional expression of the virtual head had no consistent effect on the width of the gaze cone, it did however affect the emotional state of the participants. Angry expressions produced the highest arousal values. Highest valence emerged from happy faces, lowest valence from angry faces.These results suggest that the widening of the gaze cone in social anxiety disorder is not primarily mediated by their altered emotional reactivity. Implications for gaze assessment and gaze training in therapeutic contexts are discussed.Due to interindividual variability, enlarged gaze cones are not necessarily indicative of social anxiety disorder, they merely constitute a correlate at the group level.Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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Gaze plays a crucial role in social interactions. Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD), which is associated with severe impairment of social interactions, is thus likely to exhibit disturbances of gaze perception. We conducted two experiments with SAD-patients and healthy control participants using a virtual head whose gaze could be interactively manipulated. We determined the subjective area of mutual gaze, the so-called gaze cone, and measured it prior to and after a psychotherapeutic intervention (Exp. 1). Patients exhibited larger gaze cones than control subjects. Exp. 2 varied the emotional expression of the virtual head. These data were validated using a real person (professional actor) as stimulus. Excellent reliability indices were found for our gaze cone measure. After Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, group differences in gaze cone width had disappeared. Emotional expressions were observed to modulate the gaze cone's width. Especially an angry expression caused the gaze cone to widen, possibly mediated by increased arousal. Finally, wider gaze cones in SAD-patients could be demonstrated for virtual and for real human heads confirming the ecological validity of virtual heads. The findings are of relevance for a more fine-grained understanding of perceptual processes in patients with SAD.Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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There is building evidence that highly socially anxious (HSA) individuals frequently avoid making eye contact, which may contribute to less meaningful social interactions and maintenance of social anxiety symptoms. However, research to date is lacking in ecological validity due to the usage of either static or pre-recorded facial stimuli or subjective coding of eye contact. The current study examined the relationships among trait social anxiety, eye contact avoidance, state anxiety, and participants' self-perceptions of interaction performance during a live, four-minute conversation with a confederate via webcam, and while being covertly eye-tracked. Participants included undergraduate women who conversed with same-sex confederates. Results indicated that trait social anxiety was inversely related to eye contact duration and frequency averaged across the four minutes, and positively related to state social anxiety and negative self-ratings. In addition, greater anticipatory state anxiety was associated with reduced eye contact throughout the first minute of the conversation. Eye contact was not related to post-task state anxiety or self-perception of poor performance; although, trends emerged in which these relations may be positive for HSA individuals. The current findings provide enhanced support for the notion that eye contact avoidance is an important feature of social anxiety.
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Models of attention and emotion have assigned a special status to the processing of threatening information: Facilitated attentional capture by threat and its prioritized processing would allow for swift and adequate action to potentially dangerous stimuli. In four experiments, we examined the time-course of facilitated orienting of attention to threatening scenes in the exogenous cueing paradigm. Threat value and presentation duration of the cues were systematically varied. Facilitated attentional capture by threat was limited to highly threatening pictures presented for 100 ms. No attentional effects were observed with a 28 ms cue presentation duration. At slightly longer cue presentations, 200 ms and 500 ms, results indicated no and even reduced attentional capture by threat compared with neutral information. The present results provide support for the idea that threat facilitates fast attentional orienting to its location, followed by the inhibition of attention to threat.
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Given limitations in the amount of visual information that a person can simultaneously process through to conscious perception, selective visual attention is necessary. Visual signals in the environment aid this selection process by triggering reflexive shifts of covert attention to locations of potential importance. One such signal appears to be others' eye gaze. Indeed, a gaze-cueing effect, whereby healthy adults respond faster to targets that are presented at locations cued rather than miscued by eye gaze has been consistently observed in the empirical literature. Critically though, the influences of task and cue features on this effect are not well understood. To address this gap, we report a meta-analytic integration of 423 gaze-cueing effects using a multilevel approach. A gaze-cueing effect emerged across all levels of the assessed task and cue features, indicating that others' eye gaze reliably directs observers' attention. We found that the magnitude of the gaze-cueing effect was moderated by whether direct gaze cues preceded directional gaze cues or not; the cue-target stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), whether participants had to detect, localize, or categorize targets; and the cue's facial expression. Whether or not the gaze cue remained on screen after the target appeared, and whether schematic faces, computer-generated faces, or images of real faces were used as cues, did not appear to reliably function as moderators. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed, particularly in relation to the social attention system. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
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Seeing the interactions between other people is a critical part of our everyday visual experience, but recognizing the social interactions of others is often considered outside the scope of vision and grouped with higher-level social cognition like theory of mind. Recent work, however, has revealed that recognition of social interactions is efficient and automatic, is well modeled by bottom-up computational algorithms, and occurs in visually-selective regions of the brain. We review recent evidence from these three methodologies (behavioral, computational, and neural) that converge to suggest the core of social interaction perception is visual. We propose a computational framework for how this process is carried out in the brain and offer directions for future interdisciplinary investigations of social perception.Copyright © 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.
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Evidence of preattentive and attentional biases in anxiety is evaluated from a cognitive-motivational perspective. According to this analysis, vulnerability to anxiety stems mainly from a lower threshold for appraising threat, rather than a bias in the direction of attention deployment. Thus, relatively innocuous stimuli are evaluated as having higher subjective threat value by high than low trait anxious individuals, and it is further assumed that everyone orients to stimuli that are judged to be significantly threatening. This account is contrasted with other recent cognitive models of anxiety, and implications for the etiology, maintenance and treatment of anxiety disorders are discussed.
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Gaze aversion could be a central component of the physiopathology of social phobia. The emotions of the people interacting with a person with social phobia seem to model this gaze aversion. Our research consists of testing gaze aversion in subjects with social phobia compared to control subjects in different emotional faces of men and women using an eye tracker. Twenty-six subjects with DSM-IV social phobia were recruited. Twenty-four healthy subjects aged and sex-matched constituted the control group. We looked at the number of fixations and the dwell time in the eyes area on the pictures. The main findings of this research are: confirming a significantly lower amount of fixations and dwell time in patients with social phobia as a general mean and for the 6 basic emotions independently from gender; observing a significant correlation between the severity of the phobia and the degree of gaze avoidance. However, no difference in gaze avoidance according to subject/picture gender matching was observed. These findings confirm and extend some previous results, and suggest that eye avoidance is a robust marker of persons with social phobia, which could be used as a behavioral phenotype for brain imagery studies on this disorder.Copyright 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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Situated models of emotion hypothesize that emotions are optimized for the context at hand, but most neuroimaging approaches ignore context. For the first time, we applied Granger causality (GC) analysis to determine how an emotion is affected by a person’s cultural background and situation. Electroencephalographic recordings were obtained from mainland Chinese (CHN) and US participants as they viewed and rated fearful and neutral images displaying either social or non-social contexts. Independent component analysis and GC analysis were applied to determine the epoch of peak effect for each condition and to identify sources and sinks among brain regions of interest. We found that source–sink couplings differed across culture, situation and culture × situation. Mainland CHN participants alone showed preference for an early-onset source–sink pairing with the supramarginal gyrus as a causal source, suggesting that, relative to US participants, CHN participants more strongly prioritized a scene’s social aspects in their response to fearful scenes. Our findings suggest that the neural representation of fear indeed varies according to both culture and situation and their interaction in ways that are consistent with norms instilled by cultural background.
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This study investigated in 2 experiments whether reflexive cuing of attention that occurs after perception of a gaze cue is greater for fearful than for happy faces in normal participants, as hypothesized from a social neuroscience perspective. To increase neuroecological validity, dynamic stimulus presentation was used to display faces that simultaneously morphed from a neutral expression into a happy or fearful one and shifted eye gaze from the center to the periphery. Shifts of attention resulting from a natural fearful gaze were expected to be related to participants' anxiety traits, in agreement with the often found increased selective attention to threat in anxious participants. Both hypotheses were confirmed: Fearful faces induced stronger gaze cuing than happy faces, and the strength of this cuing effect was correlated to participants' anxiety levels. These results suggest a neural network, which integrates the processing of gaze, expression, and emotional states to adaptively prime vigilance under threatening circumstances.
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The dynamic characteristics of facial expressions might affect time perception. Compared with static emotional faces, dynamic emotional faces are more intense, have higher ecological validity, and contain time series information, which may lead to time overestimation. In the present study, we aimed at investigating how dynamic characteristics of angry facial expressions affect time perception, as measured using event-related potentials (ERPs). Dynamic and static angry and neutral faces with different durations (400, 600, 800, 1000, 1200, 1400, and 1600 ms) were presented in the classical temporal bisection paradigm. Participants were asked to judge whether the duration of the presented face was closer to 400 or 1600 ms. The behavioral results showed a significant overestimation effect for dynamic angry faces compared with static faces, both in terms of proportion of long and Bisection Point. The ERP results indicated that the processing mechanisms are significantly different between judging the duration of dynamic and static angry faces. Dynamic angry faces evoked a larger N2 and Late Positive Potential than did static faces, while the static angry faces evoked a larger P2 and Early Posterior Negativity. The Contingent Negative Variation showed a complex change pattern over time. Our results indicate that dynamic angry facial expressions influence time perception differently than do static faces. Static angry faces were processed earlier and were considered to cause an overestimation of time through early emotional arousal and attentional bias, while dynamic angry faces may have caused the overestimation of time through response inhibition and late sustained attention.
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Theoretical models of social phobia implicate preferential attention to social threat in the maintenance of anxiety symptoms, though there has been limited work characterizing the nature of these biases over time. The current study utilized eye-movement data to examine the time-course of visual attention over 1500ms trials of a probe detection task. Nineteen participants with a primary diagnosis of social phobia based on DSM-IV criteria and 20 non-clinical controls completed this task with angry, fearful, and happy face trials. Overt visual attention to the emotional and neutral faces was measured in 50ms segments across the trial. Over time, participants with social phobia attend less to emotional faces and specifically less to happy faces compared to controls. Further, attention to emotional relative to neutral expressions did not vary notably by emotion for participants with social phobia, but control participants showed a pattern after 1000ms in which over time they preferentially attended to happy expressions and avoided negative expressions. Findings highlight the importance of considering attention biases to positive stimuli as well as the pattern of attention between groups. These results suggest that attention "bias" in social phobia may be driven by a relative lack of the biases seen in non-anxious participants. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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Clinical observations suggest abnormal gaze perception to be an important indicator of social anxiety disorder (SAD). Experimental research has yet paid relatively little attention to the study of gaze perception in SAD. In this article we first discuss gaze perception in healthy human beings before reviewing self-referential and threat-related biases of gaze perception in clinical and non-clinical socially anxious samples. Relative to controls, socially anxious individuals exhibit an enhanced self directed perception of gaze directions and demonstrate a pronounced fear of direct eye contact, though findings are less consistent regarding the avoidance of mutual gaze in SAD. Prospects for future research and clinical implications are discussed.
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The current study examines anxiety and age associations with attention allocation and physiological response to threats and rewards. Twenty-two healthy-adults, 20 anxious-adults, 26 healthy-youth, and 19 anxious-youth completed two eye-tracking tasks. In the Visual Scene Task (VST), participants' fixations were recorded while they viewed a central neutral image flanked by two threatening or two rewarding stimuli. In the Negative Words Task (NWT), physiological response was measured by means of pupil diameter change while negative and neutral words were presented. For both tasks, no interaction was found between anxiety and age-group. In the VST, anxious participants avoided the threatening images when groups were collapsed across age. Similarly, adults but not adolescents avoided the threatening images when collapsed across anxiety. No differences were found for rewarding images. In NWT, all subjects demonstrated increase in pupil dilation after word presentation. Only main effect of age emerged with stronger pupil dilation in adults than children. Finally, maximum pupil change was correlated with threat avoidance bias in the scene task. Gaze patterns and pupil dilation show that anxiety and age are associated with attention allocation to threats. The relations between attention and autonomic arousal point to a complex interaction between bottom-up and top-down processes as they relate to attention allocation.Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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A growing theoretical and research literature suggests that trait and state social anxiety can predict attentional patterns in the presence of emotional stimuli. The current study adds to this literature by examining the effects of state anxiety on visual attention and testing the vigilance-avoidance hypothesis, using a method of continuous visual attentional assessment. Participants were 91 undergraduate college students with high or low trait fear of negative evaluation (FNE), a core aspect of social anxiety, who were randomly assigned to either a high or low state anxiety condition. Participants engaged in a free view task in which pairs of emotional facial stimuli were presented and eye movements were continuously monitored. Overall, participants with high FNE avoided angry stimuli and participants with high state anxiety attended to positive stimuli. Participants with high state anxiety and high FNE were avoidant of angry faces, whereas participants with low state and low FNE exhibited a bias toward angry faces. The study provided partial support for the vigilance-avoidance hypothesis. The findings add to the mixed results in the literature that suggest that both positive and negative emotional stimuli may be important in understanding the complex attention patterns associated with social anxiety. Clinical implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.
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The Bivalent Fear of Evaluation (BFEO) model posits that the fear of positive evaluation (FPE) is a core feature of social anxiety. As such, high socially anxious individuals may show attention bias when faced with positive stimuli. However, most of the previous studies focused on the negative attention bias of social anxiety, and less on the attention bias of positive stimuli. Meanwhile, the effect of stimulus presentation time on the attention bias pattern was unclear. In order to investigate this question, we used a dot-probe paradigm with facial expressions (happy, fearful, angry, neutral) presented for 100 ms and 500 ms. The ERP results showed: (1) For high socially anxious group, happy faces elicited a larger N1 for valid than for invalid cued probes, whereas for healthy control group, angry faces elicited a larger N1 for valid than for invalid cued probes. (2) When valid cues following happy faces presented for 500 ms, the N1 amplitude was larger than that of invalid cues. However, when valid cues following angry and fear faces presented for 100 ms, the N1 amplitude was larger than that of invalid cues. The results showed difficulty in attention disengagement of high socially anxious individuals from positive stimuli, as reflected by N1, illustrating the positive attention bias in social anxiety. These results prove that FPE may contribute to maintaining social anxiety.Copyright © 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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While approaching celebrations for the 150 years of “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals”, scientists’ conclusions on emotion expression are still debated. Emotion expression has been traditionally anchored to prototypical and mutually exclusive facial expressions (e.g., anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise). However, people express emotions in nuanced patterns and – crucially – not everything is in the face. In recent decades considerable work has critiqued this classical view, calling for a more fluid and flexible approach that considers how humans dynamically perform genuine expressions with their bodies in context. A growing body of evidence suggests that each emotional display is a complex, multi-component, motoric event. The human face is never static, but continuously acts and reacts to internal and environmental stimuli, with the coordinated action of muscles throughout the body. Moreover, two anatomically and functionally different neural pathways sub-serve voluntary and involuntary expressions. An interesting implication is that we have distinct and independent pathways for genuine and posed facial expressions, and different combinations may occur across the vertical facial axis. Investigating the time course of these facial blends, which can be controlled consciously only in part, is recently providing a useful operational test for comparing the different predictions of various models on the lateralization of emotions. This concise review will identify shortcomings and new challenges regarding the study of emotion expressions at face, body, and contextual levels, eventually resulting in a theoretical and methodological shift in the study of emotions. We contend that the most feasible solution to address the complex world of emotion expression is defining a completely new and more complete approach to emotional investigation. This approach can potentially lead us to the roots of emotional display, and to the individual mechanisms underlying their expression (i.e., individual emotional signatures).
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Gaze direction is a powerful social cue, and there is considerable evidence that we preferentially direct our attentional resources to gaze-congruent locations. While a number of individual differences have been claimed to modulate gaze-cueing effects (e.g., trait anxiety), the modulation of gaze cueing for different emotional expressions of the cue has not been investigated in social anxiety, which is characterised by a range of attentional biases for stimuli perceived to be socially threatening. Therefore, in this study, we examined whether social anxiety modulates gaze-cueing effects for angry, fearful, and neutral expressions, while controlling for other individual-differences variables that may modulate gaze cueing: trait anxiety, depression, and autistic-like traits. In a sample of 100 female participants, we obtained large and reliable gaze-cueing effects; however, these effects were not modulated by social anxiety, or by any of the other individual-differences variables. These findings attest to the social importance of gaze cueing, and also call into question the replicability of individual differences in the effect.
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| [52] |
Socially anxious tendencies have potential to become social anxiety disorder (SAD), which is characterized by fear of social situations associated with being evaluated or embarrassed by others. In particular, others' gazes induce social anxiety. People with SAD have a negative interpretation bias toward ambiguous emotions in others' faces; however, negative interpretation bias toward ambiguous emotions in others' gazes has not been fully investigated. We used an impression judgment task to examine negative interpretation bias toward others' gazes among people with socially anxious tendencies. We generated emotionally ambiguous gazes (positive, negative, and neutral) using a morphing technique with 10% steps (neutral, 10-100% negative, and 10-100% positive). Participants (all male) were asked to judge whether the stimulus was positive or negative. Each participant's level of social anxiety was examined using the Japanese version of the Social Phobia Inventory (SPIN-J), which measures three symptom dimensions: fear, avoidance, and physiological arousal. To examine the influence of socially anxious tendencies in the impression judgment task, we calculated the point of subjective equality (PSE) using a two-step logistic curve fitted to individual participant's responses. The negative emotional intensity of the PSE became lower as the fear score became higher (p < 0.05). This result suggests individuals with a high tendency toward social anxiety tend to interpret subtle negative emotional gazes as a negative emotion and regard these gazes as a threat.
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| [53] |
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| [54] |
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| [55] |
The hypervigilance-avoidance hypothesis assumes that anxious individuals initially attend to and subsequently avoid threatening stimuli. In this study pairs of emotional (angry or happy) and neutral facial expressions were presented to students of high or low fear of negative evaluation (FNE) while their eye movements were recorded. High FNE participants initially looked more often at emotional compared to neutral faces, indicating an attentional bias for emotional facial expressions. This effect was further modulated by the sex of the face, as high FNE clearly showed a preference for happy female faces. Analysis of the time course of attention revealed that high FNE looked at the emotional faces longer during the first second of stimulus exposure, whereas they avoided these faces in the consecutive time interval from 1 to 1.5 s. These results partially support the hypervigilance-avoidance hypothesis and additionally indicate the relevance of happy faces for high FNE. Further research should clarify the meaning of happy facial expressions as well as the influence of the sex of the observed face in social anxiety.
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| [56] |
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