Threat is in the eye of the beholder: social anxiety and the interpretation of ambiguous facial expressions

The current study investigated the tendency of individuals with high levels of social anxiety to interpret ambiguous facial expressions in a threatening manner. Results obtained from self-report measures were consistent with previous studies in which highly socially anxious individuals endorsed threatening interpretations for ambiguous social information. More importantly, highly socially anxious participants showed relative facilitation of processing of threatening faces following neutral faces when a priming technique was used to eliminate artifact due to response selection bias. These findings support the hypothesized social anxiety-linked interpretive bias.     

Social anxiety and interpretation biases for facial displays of emotion: emotion detection and ratings of social cost

The current study assessed the processing of facial displays of emotion (Happy, Disgust, and Neutral) of varying emotional intensities in participants with high vs. low social anxiety. Use of facial expressions of varying intensities allowed for strong external validity and a fine-grained analysis of interpretation biases. Sensitivity to perceiving negative evaluation in faces (i.e., emotion detection) was assessed at both long (unlimited) and brief (60 ms) stimulus durations. In addition, ratings of perceived social cost were made indicating what participants judged it would be like to have a social interaction with a person exhibiting the stimulus emotion. Results suggest that high social anxiety participants did not demonstrate biases in their sensitivity to perceiving negative evaluation (i.e. disgust) in facial expressions. However, high social anxiety participants did estimate the perceived cost of interacting with someone showing disgust to be significantly greater than low social anxiety participants, regardless of the intensity of the disgust expression. These results are consistent with a specific type of interpretation bias in which participants with social anxiety have elevated ratings of the social cost of interacting with individuals displaying negative evaluation.     

社交焦虑个体对正性面孔刺激的解释偏差

本研究分别在短时（60ms）和长时（无时间限制）条件下呈现匹配的正性和中性面孔,要求高、低社交焦虑被试选择更具威胁性的面孔,以验证两者对正性刺激是否存在主观解释偏差,并考察该偏差产生于认知加工的哪一阶段。结果发现,长时条件下,高焦虑组选择正性面孔的比例显著高于低焦虑组;短时条件下无显著差异。提示高社交焦虑个体对正性刺激存在主观、外显的解释偏差,他们更倾向于对正性刺激做出消极解释,并且这种偏差产生于认知加工的后期。     

Attentional biases to internal and external sources of potential threat in social anxiety

D. M. Clark and A. Wells (1995) proposed that a shift of attention inward toward interoceptive information is a central feature of social phobia. However, few studies have examined attentional biases toward internal physiological cues in social phobia. The current experiment assessed whether socially anxious individuals exhibit an attentional bias (a) toward cues for an internal source of potential threat (heart-rate information), (b) toward cues for an external source of potential threat (threatening faces) or (c) both. Ninety-one participants who were selected to form extreme groups based on a social anxiety screening measure performed a dot-probe task to assess location of attention. Results showed that socially anxious participants exhibited an attentional bias toward cues of internal, but not external, sources of potential threat.     

The effects of social anxiety and depression on the evaluation of facial crowds

Facial crowds of emotion connoting approval or criticism are linked to the fears of socially anxious individuals. We examined evaluation ratings and decision latencies of mixed facial displays by individuals with generalized social phobia (GSPs, n = 18), individuals with comorbid depression and GSP (COMs, n = 18), and normal controls (CONs, n = 18). First, we postulated that GSPs will assign more negative ratings to predominantly disapproving audiences as compared to CONs, and that GSPs will be faster in their evaluation of these audiences (negative bias hypothesis). Second, we expected depression, but not social anxiety, to be associated with diminished positive evaluation of audiences containing predominantly happy expressions and with a slower processing of such positive cues (the impaired positivity hypothesis). Results supported the negative bias hypothesis, and provided partial support for the impaired positivity hypothesis. The importance of examining the processing of complex non-verbal cues in social anxiety and in depression is discussed.     

Emotional context influences access of visual stimuli to anxious individuals' awareness

Anxiety has been associated with enhanced unconscious processing of threat and attentional biases towards threat. Here, we focused on the phenomenology of perception in anxiety and examined whether threat-related material more readily enters anxious than non-anxious individuals' awareness. In six experiments, we compared the stimulus exposures required for each anxiety group to become objectively or subjectively aware of masked facial stimuli varying in emotional expression. Crucially, target emotion was task irrelevant. We found that high trait-anxiety individuals required less sensory evidence (shorter stimulus exposure times) to become aware of the face targets. This anxiety-based difference was observed for fearful faces in all experiments, but with non-threat faces, it emerged only when these were presented among threatening faces. Our findings suggest a prominent role for affective context in high-anxiety individuals' conscious perception of visual stimuli. Possible mechanisms underlying the influence of context in lowering awareness thresholds in anxious individuals are discussed.     

Terror mismanagement: evidence that mortality salience exacerbates attentional bias in social anxiety

Death anxiety is a basic fear underlying a range of psychological conditions, and has been found to increase avoidance in social anxiety. Given that attentional bias is a core feature of social anxiety, the aim of the present study was to examine the impact of mortality salience (MS) on attentional bias in social anxiety. Participants were 36 socially anxious and 37 non-socially anxious individuals, randomly allocated to a MS or control condition. An eye-tracking procedure assessed initial bias towards, and late-stage avoidance of, socially threatening facial expressions. As predicted, socially anxious participants in the MS condition demonstrated significantly more initial bias to social threat than non-socially anxious participants in the MS condition and socially anxious participants in the control condition. However, this effect was not found for late-stage avoidance of social threat. These findings suggest that reminders of death may heighten initial vigilance towards social threat.     

Differentiating between memory and interpretation biases in socially anxious and nonanxious individuals

Although individual cognitive biases toward threat in social anxiety are well established, few studies have examined the manner in which cognitive biases work in conjunction. In the present study, socially anxious ( n = 54 ) and nonanxious ( n = 58 ) individuals read 10 passages consisting of positive social or evaluative, negative social or evaluative, and neutral content and completed two cognitive tasks assessing memory of factual details and interpretation immediately and after 48 h. Socially anxious and nonanxious individuals did not differ in their memory for details presented in the passages. However, they made less positive and more negative interpretations of details included in the passages, particularly in positive passages that were self-relevant and particularly in positive passages after the delay. After including depression, state anxiety, and trait anxiety as covariates, biased interpretation of positive passages after the time delay remained significant, but biased interpretation of the self-relevant, positive passages did not. It is concluded that socially anxious individuals are characterized by accurate memory of threatening, factual material, but that they impose a biased interpretation upon that material, especially after some time has passed.     

Variability of attention bias in socially anxious adolescents: differences in fixation duration toward adult and adolescent face stimuli

Prior research on attention bias in anxious youth, often utilising a visual dot probe task, has yielded inconsistent findings, which may be due to how bias is assessed and/or variability in the phenomenon. The present study utilises eye gaze tracking to assess attention bias in socially anxious adolescents, and explores several methodological and within-subject factors that may contribute to variability in attention bias. Attention bias to threat was measured in forty-two treatment-seeking adolescents (age 12–16 years) diagnosed with Social Anxiety Disorder. Bias scores toward emotional stimuli (vigilant attention) and bias scores away from emotional stimuli (avoidant attention) were explored. Bias scores changed between vigilance and avoidance within individuals and over the course of stimulus presentation. These differences were not associated with participant characteristics nor with self-reported social anxiety symptoms. However, clinician rated severity of social anxiety, explained a significant proportion of variance in the bias scores for adult, but not the adolescent, stimuli. Variability in attention bias among socially anxious adolescents is common and varies as a function of stimulus duration and type. Results may inform stimulus selection for future research.     

Biased attentional processing of positive stimuli in social anxiety disorder: an eye movement study

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.     

Social Anxiety and Attention away from Emotional Faces

A substantial literature indicates that anxiety is often associated with selective attention to threat cues. Socially anxious individuals are excessively concerned about negative evaluation by others. One might therefore predict that high social anxiety would be associated with selective attention to negative facial expressions. On the other hand, some recent models have suggested that social anxiety may be associated with reduced processing of external social cues. A modified dot-probe task was used to investigate face attention. High and low socially anxious individuals were presented with pairs of pictures, consisting of a face (positive, neutral, or negative) and a household object, under conditions of social-evaluative threat or no threat. The results indicated that, compared to low socially anxious individuals, high socially anxious individuals show an attentional bias away from emotional (positive and negative) faces but this effect is only observed under conditions of social-evaluative threat. Theoretical and clinical implications of the results are discussed.     

Processing efficiency in anxiety: Evidence from eye-movements during visual search

It is generally held that anxiety is characterized by an attentional bias for threatening information. In recent years there has been an important debate whether these biases reside at the level of attentional selection (threat detection) or attentional processing after threat detection (attentional disengagement). In a visual search task containing emotional facial expressions, eye-movements were examined before and after threat detection in high and low trait anxious individuals to further elucidate the temporal unfolding of attentional bias. Results indicated that high-anxious individuals neither showed facilitated orienting to threat nor impaired disengagement of visual attention from threat. Interestingly, the presence of threat in the visual search display was associated with increased decision times in high-anxious individuals. These results challenge some of the current views on attentional bias to threat but indicate that emotional information reduces processing efficiency in anxiety.     

Facilitating a benign interpretation bias in a high socially anxious population

Previous research has shown that high socially anxious individuals lack the benign interpretation bias present in people without social anxiety. The tendency of high socially anxious people to generate more negative interpretations may lead to anticipated anxiety about future social situations. If so, developing a more benign interpretation bias could lead to a reduction in this anxiety. The current study showed that a benign interpretation bias could be facilitated (or 'trained') in a high socially anxious population. Participants in the benign training groups had repeated practice in accessing benign (positive or non-negative) interpretations of potentially threatening social scenarios. Participants in the control condition were presented with the same social scenarios but without their outcomes being specified. In a later recognition task, participants who received benign interpretation training generated more benign, and less negative, interpretations of new ambiguous social situations compared to the control group. Participants who received benign training also predicted that they would be significantly less anxious in a future social situation than those in the control group. Possible implications of the findings for therapeutic interventions in social phobia are discussed.     

Interpretation of facial expressions and social anxiety: Specificity and source of biases

Cognitive-behavioural models of social phobia (Clark & Wells, 1995; Rapee & Heimberg, 1997) propose that biased information processing contributes to the maintenance of social phobia. Given the importance of facial expressions in social interactions, recent investigations of these information-processing biases have increasingly used facial stimuli. The current study utilised schematic faces of emotional expressions to investigate interpretations of facial expressions and specific facial features in individuals with high and low social anxiety. Individuals with elevated social anxiety demonstrated biases in their perceptions of negative valence from the faces, whereas group differences were not observed for perceptions of activity or potency. Further, although the two groups generally utilised the same facial features to interpret facial expressions, the results suggested that individuals with high social anxiety may be more lenient in perceiving threat in faces than individuals without social anxiety.     

Detection of emotional expressions in rapidly changing facial displays in high- and low-socially anxious women

Facial information and attention to facial displays are distributed over spatial as well as temporal domains. Thus far, research on selective attention to (dis)approving faces in the context of social anxiety has concentrated primarily on the spatial domain. Using a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm, the present study examined the temporal characteristics of visual attention for happy and angry faces in high- (n=16) and low-socially anxious individuals (n=17), to test whether also in the temporal domain socially anxious individuals are characterized by threat-confirming attentional biases. Results indicated that presenting angry faces as the first target (T1) did not aggravate the detection of the emotional expression of the second target (T2). Yet, participants generally showed superior detection of the emotional expression of T2, if T2 was an angry face. Casting doubt on the role of such attenuated attentional blink for angry faces in social anxiety, no evidence emerged to indicate that this effect was relatively strong in high-socially anxious individuals. Finally, the presentation of an angry face as T2 resulted in a relatively hampered identification of a happy-T1. Again, this "backward blink" was not especially pronounced in high-socially anxious individuals. The present anger superiority effects are consistent with evolutionary models stressing the importance of being especially vigilant for signals of dominance. Since the effects were not especially pronounced in high-anxious individuals, the present study adds to previous findings indicating that socially anxious individuals are not characterized by a bias in the (explicit) detection of emotional expressions [Philippot, P., & Douilliez, C. (2005). Social phobics do not misinterpret facial expression of emotion. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 43, 639-652].     

Cognitive bias via the Internet: a comparison of Web-based and standard emotional Stroop tasks in social phobia

There is accumulating evidence to suggest that social phobia is associated with attentional bias for words related to social threat. Information processing in individuals with social phobia (n = 87) was investigated in the present study using 2 versions of the emotional Stroop task. Results from a standard emotional Stroop task indicated delayed colour naming of socially threatening words relative to neutral words, in line with previous research, whereas results from a Web-based emotional Stroop task indicated a facilitation effect, with faster manual indication of colour choice for socially threatening words than for neutral words. Possible explanations for these contrasting findings and issues for further research are discussed.     

Written threat: Electrophysiological evidence for an attention bias to affective words in social anxiety disorder

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is associated with heightened sensitivity to threat cues, typically represented by emotional facial expressions. To examine if this bias can be transferred to a general hypersensitivity or whether it is specific to disorder relevant cues, we investigated electrophysiological correlates of emotional word processing (alpha activity and event-related potentials) in 20 healthy participants and 20 participants with SAD. The experimental task was a silent reading of neutral, positive, physically threatening and socially threatening words (the latter were abusive swear words) while responding to a randomly presented dot. Subsequently, all participants were asked to recall as many words as possible during an unexpected recall test. Participants with SAD showed blunted sensory processing followed by a rapid processing of emotional words during early stages (early posterior negativity – EPN). At later stages, all participants showed enhanced processing of negative (physically and socially threatening) compared to neutral and positive words (N400). Moreover, at later processing stages alpha activity was increased specifically for negative words in participants with SAD but not in healthy controls. Recall of emotional words for all subjects was best for socially threatening words, followed by negative and positive words irrespective of social anxiety. The present findings indicate that SAD is associated with abnormalities in emotional word processing characterised by early hypervigilance to emotional cues followed by cognitive avoidance at later processing stages. Most importantly, the specificity of these attentional biases seems to change as a function of time with a general emotional bias at early and a more specific bias at later processing stages.     

A multi-session interpretation modification program: changes in interpretation and social anxiety symptoms

Previous research suggests that socially anxious individuals interpret ambiguous social information in a more threatening manner compared to non-anxious individuals. Recently, studies have experimentally modified interpretation and shown that this subsequently affected anxiety in non-anxious individuals. If similar procedures can modify interpretation biases in socially anxious individuals, they may lead to a reduction in social anxiety symptoms. In the current study, we examined the effect of a computerized Interpretation Modification Program (IMP) on interpretation bias and social anxiety symptoms. Twenty-seven socially anxious individuals were randomly assigned to the IMP or a control condition. Participants completed eight computer sessions over four weeks. The IMP modified interpretation by providing positive feedback when participants made benign interpretations and negative feedback in response to threat interpretations. The IMP successfully decreased threat interpretations, increased benign interpretations, and decreased social anxiety symptoms compared to the control condition. Moreover, changes in benign interpretation mediated IMP's effect on social anxiety. This initial trial suggests that interpretation modification may have clinical utility when applied as a multi-session intervention.     

Attention to Positive and Negative Social-Evaluative Words: Investigating the Effects of Social Anxiety,Trait Anxiety and Social Threat

The study investigated how attention to negative (threatening) and positive social-evaluative words is affected by social anxiety, trait anxiety and the expectation of social threat. High and low socially anxious individuals carried out a modified dot-probe task either while expecting to give a speech or under non-threatening conditions. High socially anxious individuals showed no significant attentional bias towards or away from social-evaluative words. This result significantly contrasted with an identical design that showed avoidance of emotional faces in high socially anxious participants drawn from the same population (Mansell et al ., 1999). Participants who expected to give a speech showed less attentional avoidance of negative and positive social-evaluative words. High trait anxiety was associated with selective attention to negative relative to positive social-evaluative words, consistent with earlier findings of attention to threat cues in high trait-anxious individuals. Implications for designing attention tasks and attentional bias across different dimensions of anxiety are discussed.     

Interpretation bias and social anxiety: does interpretation bias mediate the relationship between trait social anxiety and state anxiety responses?

Two studies aimed to examine whether high socially anxious individuals are more likely to negatively interpret ambiguous social scenarios and facial expressions compared to low socially anxious individuals. We also examined whether interpretation bias serves as a mediator of the relationship between trait social anxiety and state anxiety responses, in particular current state anxiety, bodily sensations, and perceived probability and cost of negative evaluation pertaining to a speech task. Study 1 used ambiguous social scenarios and Study 2 used ambiguous facial expressions as stimuli to objectively assess interpretation bias. Undergraduate students with high and low social anxiety completed measures of state anxiety responses at three time points: baseline, after the interpretation bias task, and after the preparation for an impromptu speech. Results showed that high socially anxious individuals were more likely to endorse threat interpretations for ambiguous social scenarios and to interpret ambiguous faces as negative than low socially anxious individuals. Furthermore, negative interpretations mediated the relationship between trait social anxiety and perceived probability of negative evaluation pertaining to the speech task in Study 1 but not Study 2. The present studies provide new insight into the role of interpretation bias in social anxiety.