Is eye to eye contact really threatening and avoided in social anxiety?—An eye-tracking and psychophysiology study

Shyness and face scanning in children

“…These relations were not found for sociability but were specific to the shyness temperament. Overall, these results are consistent with those of Wieser et al (2009) who recently reported that a group of non-clinical socially anxious women tended to fixate longer to the eye region than their non-socially anxious counterparts. Our findings extend their recent results to shyness and face scanning in a non-clinical sample of children.…”

“…Fatis (1983) found that shy individuals report greater negative cognitions during social interactions, including self-consciousness about their social skills during the interaction, worry about how the other person is evaluating them, and general unpleasantness of the situation. This latter hypothesis is in line with the recent report that socially anxious adults fixate longer at the eyes during face scanning (Wieser et al, 2009), leading to the hyper-vigilance hypothesis: a positive relation between shyness and dwell time to the eyes.…”

“…During social interactions, they may not dwell on the eye region at all. By this logic, they perform well on discriminating facial identity (a static characteristic) but would miss dynamic cues such as changing emotional expressions (Wieser et al, 2009). Shy children are known to show deficits in classification of emotional facial expression (Battaglia et al, 2004;Melfsen & Florin, 2002;Stirling, Eley, & Clark, 2006;Strand, Cerna, & Downs, 2008) and in accurately identifying emotional facial expressions (Simonian, Beidel, Turner, Berkes, & Long, 2001).…”

“…However, a more recent study, using eye tracking with a non-clinical adult sample reported that women high in social anxiety tended to fixate longer at the eye region than medium or low socially anxious women (Wieser, Pauli, Alpers, & Mulhberger, 2009). Even though direct gaze generated more anxiety (as measured by increased heart rate), fixations to the eye regions by high socially anxious women were observed regardless of whether the gaze direction of the stimuli was direct or averted.…”

“…The primary goal of the present study was to extend recent findings of Wieser et al (2009) by examining the relation between temperamental shyness and face scanning behavior in a nonclinical sample of 11 year-old children. Shyness and social anxiety are known to be conceptually and empirically related and have often been used interchangeably in the extant literature even though they have, in part, different meanings (Rubin & Asendorpf, 1993;Schmidt & Buss, 2009).…”