You don’t like me, do you? Enhanced ERP responses to averted eye gaze in social anxiety

Exposure to social-evaluative video clips: Neural, facial-muscular, and experiential responses and the role of social anxiety

“…The fact that no correlations were obtained with psychophysiological responses might either suggest that our measures lacked sensitivity or that the timing of stimuli precluded detection of the processes that generated these characteristic rating tendencies. Other research studying ERPs to emotional facial expressions in relation to social anxiety have revealed subtle alterations in early components (e.g., Mueller et al, 2009;Schmitz et al, 2012). However, the results are far from being consistent.…”

“…However, as shown by Mauss and colleagues (2003) results of group differences in psychophysiological reactivity remain rather small and inconsistent emphasizing cognitive mechanisms in models of social anxiety (i.e., attentional biases, dysfunctional appraisal, negative self-beliefs). Neurally larger frontocentral P3 (positive event-related potential at approximately 300 milliseconds) amplitudes towards positive social evaluative feedback have been reported (van der Veen, van der Molen, Sahibdin, & Franken, 2014) as well as generally larger LPPs to neutral social stimuli in high socially anxious individuals (Schmitz, Scheel, Rigon, Gross, & Blechert, 2012).…”

Direct gaze facilitates rapid orienting to faces: Evidence from express saccades and saccadic potentials

“…This effect cannot be explained by the influence of target-locked ERP, because it did not differentiate between direct and averted gaze in the right hemisphere for left hemifield stimuli presentation, where we observed gaze effects in saccade-locked ERP. Earlier effects of direct gaze in ERP components have seldomly been found, and mostly in tasks that draw attention towards the eyes (Berchio et al, 2016, Klucharev and Sams, 2004, Schmitz et al, 2012). In Klucharev and Sams (2004) study participants were asked to attend to emotional and neutral faces with direct or averted gaze and to indicate whenever there was a repetition of gaze direction.…”

Gaze perception in social anxiety and social anxiety disorder

“…In contrast to the studies reviewed above, recent electrophysiological evidence suggested a specific processing bias for averted gaze in social anxiety as implied by enhanced late positive potentials and (marginally significant) higher amplitudes of the P100 in response to averted gaze (Schmitz et al, 2012). These authors proposed that direct gaze might only be perceived as threatening when coupled with negative facial expressions, whereas neutral expressions with averted gaze might rather signal disinterest.…”