Do socially anxious people look at, then away from, a feared person?
After a virtual person became linked to social rejection, highly socially anxious students first looked at that person faster and then increasingly looked away from them, while low-anxious students' gaze did not distinguish the feared and safe person.
Source
Gaze Behavior in Social Fear Conditioning: An Eye-Tracking Study in Virtual Reality
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Social fear conditioning in VR: participants approached virtual agents, one (CS+) paired with a spit-like air blast and 'Get lost!', another (CS-) never; pre-acquisition, acquisition and extinction phases with continuous eye-tracking.
- N
- N=53 · 53 undergraduates with usable eye-tracking (26 high and 27 low socially anxious), a subsample of an earlier study of 60 after excluding seven for tracking failure.
- Population
- University of Regensburg psychology and media informatics students screened on the Social Phobia Inventory into high and low social anxiety groups.
- Outcome
- Fear ratings, time taken to approach agents, time to first fixation on the agent (hypervigilance) and share of fixations on the agent (attentional avoidance).
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
Students wearing a VR headset repeatedly walked (with a joystick) up to male and female virtual agents in a corridor. During the acquisition phase, one agent of each gender (the CS+) was usually followed by a spitting sound, an air puff to the neck and verbal rejection, while the other (CS-) never was; in extinction no aversive event occurred. An eye-tracker inside the headset measured how quickly participants first fixated each agent and what share of their fixations landed on the agent.
What they found
Fear ratings rose for the CS+ and fell again in extinction, showing conditioning worked (less clearly in high-anxious men). In the high socially anxious group, the first fixation on the CS+ came earlier than on the CS- early in acquisition but later than on the CS- by the end, and the share of fixations on the CS+ switched from higher to lower than the CS- over acquisition. The low socially anxious group showed no such CS+/CS- differences in gaze even though they reported more fear of the CS+, and the gaze differences disappeared after extinction.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The sample was non-clinical young students, so it does not show how people diagnosed with social anxiety disorder behave. Splitting 53 people by both anxiety level and gender left small cells, and the effect sizes for the key gaze contrasts were small, so the higher-order interactions are fragile. The aversive stimulus (air blast plus spitting sound) may have triggered disgust or physical rather than purely social fear, which the authors did not measure. Areas of interest covered the whole face and body, so the study cannot say whether people specifically avoided the eyes.
Key terms
- Fear conditioning
- Learning in which a neutral stimulus (here a virtual person) comes to evoke fear because it has been paired with an unpleasant event.
- CS+ and CS-
- The conditioned stimulus that is paired with the unpleasant event (CS+) versus a comparison stimulus that never is (CS-).
- Extinction
- The phase in which the CS+ is shown without the unpleasant event, so that the learned fear should fade.
- Vigilance-avoidance hypothesis
- The idea that anxious people first direct attention quickly toward threat and then turn attention away from it to reduce distress.
- Time to first fixation
- How long it takes before the eyes first land on a target; shorter times are used here as a sign of hypervigilance.
Flashcards
0 of 11 answers reviewed
Research intelligence for this paper
See its role on concept claims, tensions it is part of, placement history, and related discoveries.
Quiz yourself
What was the CS+ in this experiment?
Common questions
Why use virtual reality rather than photos of faces?
Photos on a screen are low in realism. In VR participants actively approach life-sized agents who look back at them, which is closer to a real social encounter while still allowing tight experimental control.
Does this prove social anxiety is caused by vigilance then avoidance?
No. It shows a gaze pattern that fits that idea in high-anxious students during one lab task; it cannot show that the pattern causes or maintains anxiety.
More on Anxiety