Social Anxiety and Attention away from Emotional Faces

Mansell, Warren; Clark, David M.; Ehlers, Anke; Chen, Yi Ping

doi:10.1080/026999399379032

Cited by 343 publications

(355 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…These authors used eye tracking to examine participants gaze during stimulus presentation. Similar to Mansell, et al (1999), they found that under ordinary circumstances, high sociallyanxious individuals were more likely to make an initial gaze shift towards the neutral face in a neutral face-object pairing. However, when participants were told they would be asked to give a speech after the task, their initial bias to orient to faces was reduced compared to the low socially-anxious group.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 54%

“…In Mansell, Clark, Ehlers, and Chen (1999), half the participants were told they would be asked to give a speech after performing the task, while the other half of the participants received no such instruction. On each trial, participants were presented with a picture of a household object paired with a picture of a face, with either a neutral, positive, or a negative expression.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Affective primes suppress attention bias to threat in socially anxious individuals

Helfinstein

White

Bar‐Haim

2008

Behaviour Research and Therapy

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Anxious individuals show an attention bias towards threatening information. However, under conditions of sustained environmental threat this otherwise-present attention bias disappears. It remains unclear whether this suppression of attention bias can be caused by a transient activation of the fear system. In the present experiment, high socially-anxious and low socially-anxious individuals (HSA group, n = 12; LSA group, n = 12) performed a modified dot-probe task in which they were shown either a neutral or socially threatening prime word prior to each trial. EEG was collected and ERP components to the prime and faces displays were computed. The behavioral results indicated that HSA individuals show an attention bias to threat after a neutral prime, but no attention bias after a threatening prime, demonstrating that suppression of attention bias can occur after a transient activation of the fear system. Low Socially Anxious individuals showed an opposite pattern: no evidence of a bias to threat with neutral primes but induction of an attention bias to threat following threat primes. ERP results suggested differential processing of the primes and faces displays by HSA and LSA individuals. However, no group by prime interaction was found for any of ERP components.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 54%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Affective primes suppress attention bias to threat in socially anxious individuals

Helfinstein

White

Bar‐Haim

2008

Behaviour Research and Therapy

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“…Avoidance of emotional faces (positive and negative) has been observed in participants with social anxiety (Mansell et al, 1999). Therefore, given the evidence of a relationship between drive-for-thinness and social anxiety (Gilbert and Meyer, 2003;Hinrichsen et al, 2004), it is plausible that the bias away from emotional faces exhibited by the high EDI scorers and patients with eating disorders might be a consequence of concomitant social anxiety.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The influence of variations in eating disorder-related symptoms on processing of emotional faces in a non-clinical female sample: An eye-tracking study

Sharpe

Ridout

2016

Psychiatry Research

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The influence of variations in eating disorder-related symptoms on processing of emotional faces in a non-clinical female sample: an eye-tracking study 1 1FACE PROCESSING AND DISORDERED EATING , Psychiatry Research, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016Research, http://dx.doi.org/10. /j.psychres.2016 This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting galley proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. non-clinical samples. They also displayed biased attention away from emotional faces during later strategic processing, which is consistent with previously observed impairments in clinical samples. These differences were related to drive-for-thinness.Although we found no evidence of a bias towards angry faces, it is plausible that the observed impairments in emotion recognition and avoidance of emotional faces could disrupt social functioning and act as a risk factor for the development of eating disorders.

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“…Bogels and Mansell (2004) have outlined several methodological advantages of the dot-probe paradigm over the Stroop: (a) true selective attention can be examined via the simultaneous presentation of threat and distracter items, (b) the reliance on the meaningless detection cue (i.e., a dot) renders mental preoccupation unlikely to affect the reaction time, and (c) both hypervigilance and avoidance can be indexed in the same paradigm. Nonetheless, findings from this paradigm (using either words or pictures) are mixed, suggesting attentional hypervigilance (e.g., Mogg & Bradley, 2002;Musa, Lepine, Clark, Mansell, & Ehlers, 2003;Mogg, Philippot, & Bradley, 2004;Sposari & Rapee, 2007), attentional avoidance (e.g., Mansell, Clark, Ehlers, & Chen, 1999;, difficulty in attentional disengagement (Amir, Elias, Klumpp, & Przeworski, 2003) or no evidence of attentional bias linked to social anxiety (e.g., Horenstein & Segui, 1997;. Asmundson and Stein (1994) compared 24 patients with generalized SAD with 20 healthy controls using a modified dot-probe task.…”

Section: Modified Dot-probe Test Based On Word Stimulimentioning

confidence: 96%

Attentional biases in social anxiety: An investigation using the inattentional blindness paradigm

Lee

Telch

2008

Behaviour Research and Therapy

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Social anxiety disorder is the third most common mental disorder with the lifetime prevalence rate of 13.3% in the US population. Typically, it causes significant impairment in a wide range of functioning and follows a chronic, unremitting course if untreated. Over the past two decades, there has been a dramatic increase in clinical research aimed at examining underlying mechanisms maintaining social anxiety.One line of research has investigated attentional biases in social anxiety, using various cognitive experiment paradigms, including the emotional Stroop and the modified dotprobe tasks. However, overall findings are equivocal about the nature of attentional biases in social anxiety and several methodological problems limit the interpretability of the data. The present study examined attentional biases associated with social anxiety using a new research paradigm in the field of anxiety disorders: the inattentional blindness paradigm. This paradigm presents a social cue in the absence of the subjects' expectation while they are engaged in a cognitively demanding task, thereby enabling the v more purely attentional aspect of information processing to be examined reducing the influence of potential response biases or effortful strategies. Two independent experiments were conducted using nonclinical student samples consisting of individuals high in social anxiety (HSAs) versus individuals low in social anxiety (LSAs) based on the static and sustained inattentional blindness tasks. Overall, results revealed that HSAs were more likely to detect or identify a socially-threatening cue, relative to LSAs; whereas LSAs were more likely to detect or identify a non-threatening social cue, relative to HSAs. These findings were observed only in the presence of a bogus-speech manipulation. These data suggest the promising utility of the inattentional blindness paradigm in investigating attentional biases in social anxiety and perhaps other psychopathological conditions. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.vi

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Social Anxiety and Attention away from Emotional Faces

Cited by 343 publications

References 28 publications

Affective primes suppress attention bias to threat in socially anxious individuals

Affective primes suppress attention bias to threat in socially anxious individuals

The influence of variations in eating disorder-related symptoms on processing of emotional faces in a non-clinical female sample: An eye-tracking study

Attentional biases in social anxiety: An investigation using the inattentional blindness paradigm

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