Face Perception in Social Anxiety: Visuocortical Dynamics Reveal Propensities for Hypervigilance or Avoidance

McTeague, Lisa M.; Laplante, Marie-Claude; Bulls, Hailey W.; Shumen, Joshua R.; Lang, Peter; Keil, Andreas

doi:10.1016/j.biopsych.2017.10.004

Cited by 38 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 105 publications

(107 reference statements)

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“…That is, higher degree to self-focus may reduce attentional bias to threat in SAD and highly anxious individuals (Judah et al , 2013 ). A recent study also reported non-linear and distinct patterns of initial attentional capture to threat in SAD based on symptom severity, demonstrating that the most severe SAD patients showed avoidant patterns to social threats (McTeague et al , 2018 ). Despite increasing evidence on initial attentional bias to threat in SAD both at neural and behavioral levels, to our knowledge, neural mechanisms of persistent attentional bias to threats in SAD have not been reported.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…Additionally, uncertainty exists regarding whether attention dwells on or moves away from environmental threats in patients with SAD because mixed results have been reported in various experimental circumstances (Gilboa-Schechtman et al , 1999 ; Chen et al , 2002 ; Mansell et al , 2003 ; Spector et al , 2003 ). Recently, McTeague et al ( 2018 ) reported a sustained bias for hypervigilance or avoidance depending on the severity of functional impairments in patients with SAD using visual-evoked potentials.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is well known that anxiety impairs efficient functioning of the goal-directed attentional system (Eysenck et al , 2007 ), and task-irrelevant social stimuli often capture attention, impairing SAD patients’ social functions. Moreover, recent studies have added understanding of relation between anxiety and attention in SAD by discovering moderators of initial attentional bias in social anxiety (Judah et al , 2013 ; Taylor et al , 2016 ; McTeague et al , 2018 ). That is, higher degree to self-focus may reduce attentional bias to threat in SAD and highly anxious individuals (Judah et al , 2013 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Neural evidence for persistent attentional bias to threats in patients with social anxiety disorder

Kim

Shin

Lee

et al. 2018

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience

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Does the biased attention toward social threats dwells on or disappears in patients with social anxiety disorder (SAD)? We investigated the neural mechanism of attentional bias in terms of attentional capture and holding in SAD. A total of 31 SAD patients and 30 healthy controls performed a continuous performance task detecting the orientation of a red letter ‘T’ while angry or neutral face distractors appeared or disappeared at the center of the screen. Behaviorally, typical attentional capture effects were found in response to abruptly appearing distractors in both groups. The patient group showed significant attentional dwelling effects in response to the angry face distractor only. Patients showed increased neural activity in the amygdala, insula/inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) compared with those of controls for the abruptly appearing angry distractor. Patients also maintained increased activities in brain regions related to attentional reorienting to distractor, namely the TPJ and IFG in line with their behavioral results of attentional holding effects. Our results indicate that patients with SAD showed prolonged attentional bias to task-irrelevant social threats. The underlying mechanism of prolonged attentional bias in SAD was indicated with amygdala hyperactivity and continued activity of the bottom-up attention network including the TPJ and IFG.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Neural evidence for persistent attentional bias to threats in patients with social anxiety disorder

Kim

Shin

Lee

et al. 2018

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience

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“…The ssVEP originates primarily from the visual striate cortex (Di Russo et al, 2007 ). Critically, the power at the driving frequency can be taken as a measure of visuocortical population activity, and the envelope of the amplitude at the driving frequency can be extracted in the temporal domain (e.g., McTeague et al, 2018 ) to assess fluctuations in visuocortical activity across time (i.e., many seconds) with millisecond resolution. To generalize across a range of luminance levels used in studies of both pupil size and EEG, the relationship between pupil size and visuocortical activity was examined under five luminance conditions, ranging from 0.4 to 70.7 cd/m 2 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing the relationship between pupil diameter and visuocortical activity

2018

Self Cite

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Visuocortical activity and pupil diameter both increase in tasks involving memory, attention, and physiological arousal. Thus, the question arises whether pupil dilation prompts a subsequent increase in visuocortical activity. In this study, we investigated the extent to which changes in visuocortical activity relate to changes in pupil diameter. The amplitude of the sustained visuocortical response to a flickering stimulus (i.e., steady-state visually evoked potential [ssVEP] power) was examined in 39 participants while pupil diameter was measured. To generalize across stimulus conditions, Gabor stimuli varied in brightness and ssVEP driving frequency. As expected, brighter stimuli prompted pupil constriction and larger ssVEP power. To determine whether momentary fluctuations in pupil size contribute to the ssVEP amplitude under conditions of constant luminance and frequency, the single-trial means from each measure were correlated and the shape of the pupil-diameter waveform related to the ssVEP amplitude time course, both within and between participants. Under constant conditions, changes in pupil diameter were not related to changes in ssVEP amplitude, at any luminance level or driving frequency. Findings suggest that pupil dilation does not systematically prompt subsequent changes in visuocortical activity, and thus is not a sufficient cause of visuocortical modulation in cognitive or affective tasks.

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“…A recent computational study supported this hypothesis by showing that an artificial deep neural network, whose training requires a large amount of stimuli with repetition, has the ability to encode emotional content (Kragel et al, 2019). In human observers, such differential sensitivity to visual features associated with emotional content may be acquired through daily experience (McTeague et al, 2018). However, given that the exemplars used in the present study were novel for the participants, and presented only five times across the duration of the study, it is unlikely that retinotopic visual cortex learned to represent individual features that are linked to emotional significance during the course of the experimental session.…”

Section: Multivariate Versus Univariate Methodsmentioning

confidence: 94%

Decoding Multivoxel Representations of Affective Scenes in Retinotopic Visual Cortex

Yin

Liu³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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The perception of opportunities and threats in complex scenes represents one of the main functions of the human visual system. In the laboratory, its neurophysiological basis is often studied by having observers view pictures varying in affective content. This body of work has consistently shown that viewing emotionally engaging, compared to neutral, pictures (1) heightens blood flow in limbic structures and frontoparietal cortex, as well as in anterior ventral and dorsal visual cortex, and (2) prompts an increase in the late positive event-related potential (LPP), a scalp-recorded and time-sensitive index of engagement within the network of aforementioned neural structures. The role of retinotopic visual cortex in this process has, however, been contentious, with competing theoretical notions predicting the presence versus absence of emotion-specific signals in retinotopic visual areas. The present study used multimodal neuroimaging and machine learning to address this question by examining the large-scale neural representations of affective pictures. Recording EEG and fMRI simultaneously while observers viewed pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral affective pictures, and applying multivariate pattern analysis to single-trial BOLD activities in retinotopic visual cortex, we identified three robust findings: First, unpleasant-versus-neutral decoding accuracy, as well as pleasant-versus-neutral decoding accuracy, were well above chance level in all retinotopic visual areas, including primary visual cortex. Second, the decoding accuracy in ventral visual cortex, but not in early visual cortex or dorsal visual cortex, was significantly correlated with LPP amplitude. Third, effective connectivity from amygdala to ventral visual cortex predicted unpleasant-versus-neutral decoding accuracy, and effective connectivity from ventral frontal cortex to ventral visual cortex predicted pleasant-versus-neutral decoding accuracy. These results suggest that affective pictures evoked valence-specific multivoxel neural representations in retinotopic visual cortex and that these multivoxel representations were influenced by reentry signals from limbic and frontal brain regions.

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Face Perception in Social Anxiety: Visuocortical Dynamics Reveal Propensities for Hypervigilance or Avoidance

Cited by 38 publications

References 105 publications

Neural evidence for persistent attentional bias to threats in patients with social anxiety disorder

Neural evidence for persistent attentional bias to threats in patients with social anxiety disorder

Assessing the relationship between pupil diameter and visuocortical activity

Decoding Multivoxel Representations of Affective Scenes in Retinotopic Visual Cortex

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