Do socially anxious people see neutral faces as threatening?
After reading a negative sentence about themselves, socially anxious students showed stronger sustained brain responses to, and more negative ratings of, perfectly neutral faces.
Source
The Effect of Affective Context on Visuocortical Processing of Neutral Faces in Social Anxiety
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Within-subject manipulation of sentence context (negative, positive, neutral) before neutral faces, crossed with high vs low social anxiety groups; 128-channel EEG ERPs and valence/arousal ratings.
- N
- N=47 · 47 analysed (24 high and 23 low socially anxious) after excluding invited participants for EEG artifacts or depression, selected from a pre-screening of over 700 students.
- Population
- Undergraduate students at the University of Würzburg without psychiatric diagnoses, selected for high or low social anxiety
- Outcome
- ERP components to faces (P100, N170, EPN, LPP) and ratings of face valence and arousal
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
Students scoring high or low on a social anxiety screen read short self-related sentences that were negative, positive or neutral (for example, about how someone felt about them), and each sentence was followed by a photo of a neutral face. The same faces were rotated across contexts so any difference came only from the preceding sentence. EEG recorded brain responses to each face, and participants rated how pleasant and arousing each face seemed.
What they found
Socially anxious students had larger early P100 responses to all faces, suggesting general vigilance, but smaller N170 responses, suggesting less detailed face encoding. Negative and positive contexts both boosted an early attention response (EPN) in everyone. At a later stage (LPP), low-anxious students responded most to faces after positive sentences, whereas high-anxious students responded more to faces after negative than neutral sentences. High-anxious students also rated faces in negative contexts as more negative, and marginally more arousing, than low-anxious students did.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The sample was sub-clinical students, not people diagnosed with social anxiety disorder, so effects in patients may differ. Groups also differed in trait anxiety and depression scores, so not every difference is specific to social anxiety, and several interaction effects were only just significant. The design compares pre-existing groups, so it cannot show that these processing biases cause social anxiety rather than result from it.
Key terms
- Event-related potential (ERP)
- The average EEG brain response time-locked to a stimulus, which reveals processing stages in milliseconds.
- P100
- An early visual ERP peak around a tenth of a second after a stimulus, larger when attention is drawn to it.
- N170
- A face-sensitive ERP component thought to reflect structural encoding of a face.
- Late positive potential (LPP)
- A later, sustained ERP component indexing prolonged motivated attention to emotionally significant stimuli.
- Interpretation bias
- A tendency to read ambiguous or neutral information as threatening, proposed to maintain social anxiety.
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Quiz yourself
What was manipulated within participants?
Common questions
If the faces were neutral, how can anxiety change the brain response?
The preceding sentence set up an expectation, and the brain's later response reflected that top-down context, especially for negative self-related context in anxious people.
Why is a smaller N170 interesting if the P100 was bigger?
It suggests anxious people notice faces quickly but then process them less deeply, consistent with vigilance followed by avoidance.
Were the participants clinically anxious?
No, they were students selected for high or low scores on a screening questionnaire, with no diagnosed disorders.
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