Higher levels of depression are associated with reduced global bias in visual processing

Sleep-related attentional bias is a well-documented finding in patients with primary insomnia. To address the question of whether attentional preference for sleep-related stimuli is due to sleepiness (as measured by the Stanford Sleepiness Scale; SSS) or sleeplessness (as measured by the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index; PSQI) we investigated 105 non-clinical participants with two attentional bias tasks, an emotional Stroop task and a newly introduced mixed-modality task. The emotional Stroop task revealed significant positive linear relationships between sleep-related attentional bias and both poor sleep quality and sleepiness. Additionally, we found a significant negative interaction effect between these two variables on the cognitive bias. This means that attentional bias scores are reduced when poor sleep quality is associated with high sleepiness and high sleep quality is associated with low sleepiness. We did not find any significant result in the mixed-modality task. The results suggest that sleep-related attentional bias can be elicited by both sleepiness and sleeplessness.     

Contradictions of emotion in schizophrenia

This paper considers contradictory features of emotional or affective experience and expression in schizophrenia in light of the “Kretschmerian paradox”—the fact that schizophrenia-spectrum patients can simultaneously experience both exaggerated and diminished levels of affective response. An attempt is made to explain the paradox and explore its implications. Recent research on emotion in schizophrenia is reviewed, including subjective reports, psychophysiological measures of arousal or activation, and behavioural measures, focusing on flat-affect and negative-symptom patients. After discussing relevant concepts and vocabulary of emotion (“affect”, “emotion”, “mood”, “feelings”, the “passions”), the need for a phenomenological approach focusing on subjective experience is proposed. Four modes of nonparanoid experience in schizophrenia are discussed: Bodily Alienation, Disengagement, Unworlding, and Subjectivisation. Each mode involves withdrawal from functional contexts—temporal, practical, and interpersonal—normally associated with emotional reactivity and expression; each may be accompanied by forms of non-emotional affectivity no less intense than the emotions they replace. Possible relationships between psychophysiological measures, expressive behaviour, and subjective emotional or affective response are considered.     

Affective asynchrony and the measurement of the affective attitude component

Theoretical models of social phobia propose that biased attention contributes to the maintenance of symptoms; however these theoretical models make opposing predictions. Specifically, whereas Rapee and Heimberg (1997) suggested the biases are characterised by hypervigilance to threat cues and difficulty disengaging attention from threat, Clark and Wells (1995) suggested that threat cues are largely avoided. Previous research has been limited by the almost exclusive reliance on behavioural response times to experimental tasks to provide an index of attentional biases. The current study evaluated the relationship between the time-course of attention and symptoms of social anxiety and depression. Forty-two young adults completed a dot-probe task with emotional faces while eye-movement data were collected. The results revealed that increased social anxiety was associated with attention to emotional (rather than neutral) faces over time as well as difficulty disengaging attention from angry expressions; some evidence was found for a relationship between heightened depressive symptoms and increased attention to fear faces.     

Task relevance modulates processing of distracting emotional stimuli

Relatively little is known about the integration of people's fear-related dispositions and their expectations about stressful events. This research used information integration theory to examine how participants’ anxiety sensitivity and event expectancy are integrated to determine their social anxiety. Three studies were conducted—two with university students and one with anxiety clinic patients—in which participants were presented with multiple scenarios of a socially embarrassing event, each representing a different degree of event probability, from which subjective expectancies were derived. Independent variables included anxiety sensitivity (low, moderate, high) and event expectancy (low, medium, high, no probability information). Participants were asked to indicate their anxiety (dependent measure) in each expectancy condition in this 3 × 4 mixed, quasi-experimental design. The results of all three studies strongly suggest that anxiety sensitivity and event expectancy are integrated additively to produce social anxiety. Additional results and their implications for the treatment of anxiety-related disorders are also discussed.     

Looking at me,appreciating you: Self-focused attention distinguishes between gratitude and indebtedness

We provide evidence that self-focused attention (both dispositional and situationally induced) affects the evaluation of a benefactor. Specifically, self-focused attention distinguishes between gratitude and indebtedness. In Study 1, gratitude correlated negatively with dispositional public self-focused attention and social anxiety, whereas indebtedness correlated positively with public self-focused attention and social anxiety. In Study 2, participants recalled a recent benefit under either high self-focused attention, induced via a mirror, or low self-focused attention. Highly self-focused individuals recalled increased indebtedness, but not gratitude, toward a benefactor, relative to those in the control condition. Self-focused individuals also felt less commitment and closeness to the benefactor. The implications for the link between self-focus and social emotions (and thus social life) are discussed.     

Exogenous attention to angry faces in social anxiety: A perceptual accuracy approach

We investigated the interaction between endogenous and exogenous attention for the processing of emotional stimuli in individuals with high social anxiety using accuracy rates. Following the presentation of an endogenous cue at the centre, exogenous cues (i.e., angry and neutral faces) were presented at peripheral locations. Subsequently, non-emotional masked targets were presented, and the participants were instructed to discriminate between the targets. With respect to exogenous attention, high socially anxious people exhibited higher accuracy when the angry face and target appeared on the same side than when they appeared on different sides, whereas low socially anxious people did not exhibit such effects. On the other hand, different abilities of endogenous attention were not observed between high and low socially anxious people. These results suggest that exogenous attention is biased towards threat in high socially anxious people.     

Early information processing biases in social anxiety

Considerable controversy persists regarding the nature of threat-related attention biases in social anxiety. Previous studies have not considered how variations in the temporal and energetic dimensions of affective stimulus delivery interact with anxiety-related individual differences to predict biased attention. We administered a visual dot-probe task, using faces that varied in affective intensity (mild, moderate, strong) and presentation rate (100, 500, 1,250 ms) to a selected sample. The high, compared to the low, socially anxious group showed vigilance towards angry faces and emotionally ambiguous faces more generally during rapid (100 ms) presentations. By 1,250 ms, there was only a non-specific motor slowing associated with angry faces in the high socially anxious group. Findings suggest the importance of considering both chronometric and energetic dimensions of affective stimuli when examining anxiety-related attention biases. Future studies should consider using designs that more closely replicate aspects of real-world interaction to study processing biases in socially anxious populations.     

Identification of emotional facial expressions among behaviorally inhibited adolescents with lifetime anxiety disorders

The current study examined differences in emotion expression identification between adolescents characterised with behavioural inhibition (BI) in childhood with and without a lifetime history of anxiety disorder. Participants were originally assessed for BI during toddlerhood and for social reticence during childhood. During adolescence, participants returned to the laboratory and completed a facial emotion identification task and a clinical psychiatric interview. Results revealed that behaviorally inhibited adolescents with a lifetime history of anxiety disorder displayed a lower threshold for identifying fear relative to anger emotion expressions compared to non-anxious behaviorally inhibited adolescents and non-inhibited adolescents with or without anxiety. These findings were specific to behaviorally inhibited adolescents with a lifetime history of social anxiety disorder. Thus, adolescents with a history of both BI and anxiety, specifically social anxiety, are more likely to differ from other adolescents in their identification of fearful facial expressions. This offers further evidence that perturbations in the processing of emotional stimuli may underlie the aetiology of anxiety disorders.     

Social anxiety biases the evaluation of facial displays: Evidence from single face and multi-facial stimuli

This study examined the contribution of social anxiety to the evaluation of emotional facial stimuli, while controlling for the gender of participants and stimuli. Participants (n=63) completed two tasks: a single face evaluation task in which they had to evaluate angry versus neutral faces and, a facial crowd evaluation task in which they had to evaluate displays with a varying number of neutral and angry faces. In each task, participants had to evaluate the stimuli with respect to (a) the degree of disapproval expressed by the single face/crowd, and (b) the perceived difficulty of interacting with the face/crowd (emotional cost). Consistent with earlier studies, results showed that social anxiety modulated the evaluation of single faces for emotional cost, but not for disapproval ratings. In contrast, the evaluation of facial crowds was modulated by social anxiety on both ratings.     

Social anxiety and the accuracy of predicted affect

Social anxiety is theorised to arise from sustained over-activation of a mammalian evolved system for detecting and responding to social threat with corresponding diminished opportunities for attaining the pleasure of safe attachments. Emotional forecasting data from two holidays were used to test the hypothesis that greater social anxiety would be associated with decreased expectations of positive affect (PA) and greater anticipated negative affect (NA) on a holiday marked by group celebration (St. Patrick's Day) while being associated with greater predicted PA for daters on a romantic holiday (Valentine's Day). Participants completed symptom reports, made affective forecasts and provided multiple affect reports throughout each holiday. Higher levels of social anxiety were associated with greater anticipated PA for Valentine's Day daters, but lower experienced PA on the holiday; this was not found for trait anxiety and depression. Alternatively, trait anxiety, depression and social anxiety were associated with less predicted PA for St. Patrick's Day, greater anticipated NA and diminished experienced PA/greater NA during the holiday. Results are discussed in light of perceived hope for rewarding safe emotional contact for those daters in contrast to the greater possibility for social threat associated with group celebration typical of St. Patrick's Day.