The Effect of Penalty Anticipation on the Shy Individual's Attention Bias

Min-Xia XU Xian JianWang

Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2022, Vol. 45 ›› Issue (5) : 1144-1151.

PDF(776 KB)
PDF(776 KB)
Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2022, Vol. 45 ›› Issue (5) : 1144-1151.

The Effect of Penalty Anticipation on the Shy Individual's Attention Bias

  • Min-Xia XU1,Xian JianWang2,2, 2, 2
Author information +
History +

Abstract

Shyness individuals, regardless of the type of shyness, are more likely to show a bias toward a threat of stimulation. According to cognitive theory, the anxiety components of shy individuals improve the ability of attention system from bottom to top, and damage the top-down attention system, thereby automatically deploying additional attention resources, highlighting emotional stimuli, especially threatening stimuli. The attention bias in cognitive bias is an important reason for shyness. Rewards and punishment can also guide individuals' attention bias. Shy individuals are more sensitive to punishment information. This study adopts Wang Qianqian Henderson revised "College Students' Shyness Scale", we collected 170 freshmen in university, the final effective subjects was 45, the dot probe paradigm was used to study, through three experiments to investigate the expected punishment effect on attentional bias of shy individuals. In Experiment 1, the design is 2 (expectation: reward, punishment) × 3 (emotion: positive, negative, neutral); Experiment 2 and 3, through eye movement test, respectively explored the effect of punishment frequency and punishment size on attention bias in shy individuals. The experiment was designed for 2 (penalty frequency: 30%, 70%) × 2 (time process: 500ms, 1250ms), and the experiment 3 was designed for 2 (punishment size: big, small) × 2 (time process: 500ms, 1250ms), these three experimental’ design are subjects. This study draws the following results: (a) The shy individual pays attention to the negative face under the expected condition. There is a bias towards positive faces under the expectation of reward. (b) When the time of presentation is 500ms, the change of the frequency of punishment does not affect the attention bias of the shy individuals. However, when the punishment frequency is 70%, shyness individuals have more attention to face pictures, while shy individuals maintain more attention to face pictures under 30% penalty frequency. When the presentation time is 1250ms, the shy individuals initially escape from the face images when the punishment frequency is 30%, and the initial attention time is very short. (c) Present time 500ms time course, the expected punishment under the condition of large individual attention detection initial shyness and time for emotional faces sustained attention; expected punishment under the condition of small, shy individuals on emotional face pictures does not exist attention detection and sustained attention. In the present time 1250ms time course, the expected punishment under the condition of shyness for emotional faces in images do not exist attention bias and sustained attention; the expected punishment under the condition of small, shy individuals for emotional faces still showed no initial attention detection, but after a period of time, there are some shy individuals sustained attention on the emotional faces. In sum, in the early stage of attention, shy individuals avoid negative emotional faces under different punishment anticipation conditions. At the later stage of the attention process, shy individuals for emotional faces still showed no initial attention detection.

Key words

Shyness / Attention Bias / Penalty Anticipation / Eye Movement

Cite this article

Download Citations
Min-Xia XU Xian JianWang. The Effect of Penalty Anticipation on the Shy Individual's Attention Bias[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2022, 45(5): 1144-1151
PDF(776 KB)

Accesses

Citation

Detail

Sections
Recommended

/