Attention allocation to subliminally presented affective faces in high and low social anxiety

Duval, Elizabeth R.; Lovelace, Christopher T.; Filion, Diane L.

doi:10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2020.04.017

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 58 publications

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“…In return for looking more at bodies, adolescents with AN attended less to faces, particularly to faces showing angry expressions. This is partly comparable with results in individuals with social anxiety disorder who have been found to show attention biases towards angry faces in early attentional processes (Armstrong & Olatunji, 2012;Duval et al, 2020;Liang et al, 2017) and avoidance of (angry) faces in later, more conscious aspects of attention (Garner et al, 2006), as well as gaze (Weeks et al, 2013) and behavior (Heuer et al, 2007). Importantly, this behavioral avoidance might further exacerbate symptoms of social anxiety (Kashdan et al, 2014), thereby acting as a maintenance factor.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 84%

Attention Biases for Eating Disorder-Related Stimuli Versus Social Stimuli in Adolescents with Anorexia Nervosa – An Eye-Tracking Study

Sfärlea

Radix²,

Schulte‐Körne

et al. 2022

Res Child Adolesc Psychopathol

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Anorexia nervosa (AN) is characterized by attention biases for eating disorder-related information as well as altered attentional processing of social information. However, little is known about the interplay between the altered attentional processing of these two types of information. The present study investigates attention biases for eating disorder-related information (pictures of bodies) versus social information (pictures of faces), in adolescents with AN. Attention biases were assessed via eye-tracking during a passive-viewing task in which female bodies and faces were presented simultaneously and thus competed directly for attention. Female adolescents (13–18 years) with AN (n = 28) were compared to a clinical comparison group (adolescents with major depression; n = 20) and a comparison group of adolescents with no mental illness (n = 24). All groups looked longer at bodies than at faces, i.e., showed attention biases for bodies in maintenance of attention. These biases were more pronounced in adolescents with AN than in both comparison groups, particularly for underweight bodies, at the expense of looking less at social stimuli. The results indicate “dual” attention biases in adolescents with AN (i.e., towards bodies and away from emotional faces) which could have a twofold negative impact on eating disorder psychopathology: increased attention to eating disorder-related information might directly influence eating disorder symptoms while less attention to social information might have an indirect influence through the amplification of interpersonal difficulties.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 84%

Attention Biases for Eating Disorder-Related Stimuli Versus Social Stimuli in Adolescents with Anorexia Nervosa – An Eye-Tracking Study

Sfärlea

Radix²,

Schulte‐Körne

et al. 2022

Res Child Adolesc Psychopathol

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“…Intriguingly, an interaction between emotional expression and prior expectations on response time was driven predominantly by subjects with higher trait anxiety. Previous research has shown that people with higher trait anxiety have heightened perceptual and attentional biases towards threat (Mogg et al, 2007;Grillon and Charney, 2011;Sussman et al, 2016;Damjanovic et al, 2017) even when unconsciously-presented (Duval et al, 2020). Unconscious attentional capture is a plausible explanation for the exaggerated response time advantage seen in more anxious participants for unexpected fearful faces, where more anxious participants might perceive fearful faces as being more informative than less anxious participants.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 91%

Surprising Threats Accelerate Conscious Perception

McFadyen

Tsuchiya

Mattingley

et al. 2022

Front. Behav. Neurosci.

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The folk psychological notion that “we see what we expect to see” is supported by evidence that we become consciously aware of visual stimuli that match our prior expectations more quickly than stimuli that violate our expectations. Similarly, “we see what we want to see,” such that more biologically-relevant stimuli are also prioritised for conscious perception. How, then, is perception shaped by biologically-relevant stimuli that we did not expect? Here, we conducted two experiments using breaking continuous flash suppression (bCFS) to investigate how prior expectations modulated response times to neutral and fearful faces. In both experiments, we found that prior expectations for neutral faces hastened responses, whereas the opposite was true for fearful faces. This interaction between emotional expression and prior expectations was driven predominantly by participants with higher trait anxiety. Electroencephalography (EEG) data collected in Experiment 2 revealed an interaction evident in the earliest stages of sensory encoding, suggesting prediction errors expedite sensory encoding of fearful faces. These findings support a survival hypothesis, where biologically-relevant fearful stimuli are prioritised for conscious access even more so when unexpected, especially for people with high trait anxiety.

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Attention allocation to subliminally presented affective faces in high and low social anxiety

Cited by 2 publications

References 58 publications

Attention Biases for Eating Disorder-Related Stimuli Versus Social Stimuli in Adolescents with Anorexia Nervosa – An Eye-Tracking Study

Attention Biases for Eating Disorder-Related Stimuli Versus Social Stimuli in Adolescents with Anorexia Nervosa – An Eye-Tracking Study

Surprising Threats Accelerate Conscious Perception

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