Socio-cognitive load and social anxiety in an emotional anti-saccade task

Abstract

The anti-saccade task has been used to measure attentional control related to general anxiety but less so with social anxiety specifically. Previous research has not been conclusive in suggesting that social anxiety may lead to difficulties in inhibiting faces. It is possible that static face paradigms do not convey a sufficient social threat to elicit an inhibitory response in socially anxious individuals. The aim of the current study was twofold. We investigated the effect of social anxiety on performance in an anti-saccade task with neutral or emotional faces preceded either by a social stressor (Experiment 1), or valenced sentence primes designed to increase the social salience of the task (Experiment 2). Our results indicated that latencies were significantly longer for happy than angry faces. Additionally, and surprisingly, high anxious participants made more erroneous anti-saccades to neutral than angry and happy faces, whilst the low anxious groups exhibited a trend in the opposite direction. Results are consistent with a general approach-avoidance response for positive and threatening social information. However increased socio-cognitive load may alter attentional control with high anxious individuals avoiding emotional faces, but finding it more difficult to inhibit ambiguous faces. The effects of social sentence primes on attention appear to be subtle but suggest that the anti-saccade task will only elicit socially relevant responses where the paradigm is more ecologically valid.

The effect of working memory load on selective attention to emotional faces for social anxiety individuals

“…Although many studies have explored how the WM load affects selective attention in SA individuals, they have yielded inconsistent results. For example, some studies have shown that increased WM load would lead to decreased attention control and greater difficulty for SA individuals or trait anxiety in escaping threat‐related distractors (Berggren et al, 2012 ; McKendrick et al, 2018 ). Interestingly, another study found that high (compared to low) SA individuals were more likely to be distracted by task‐irrelevant face stimuli (e.g., angry faces) and required longer reaction times to recognize target letters in visual search tasks under high cognitive load.…”

“…The inconsistent results in previous studies may be due to the fact that the WM load was not adequately manipulated. For example, McKendrick et al ( 2018 ) informed participants about the speech task information (e.g., the participants were told that they would have to give a speech to the audience) before completing the anti‐saccade task to increase social‐cognitive load. However, the speech task increases the SA rather than the demands on WM, which is usually regarded as the process of maintaining and manipulating information in a short time (Baddeley, 1992 ).…”