Anxiety
Do socially anxious people look at, then away from, a feared person?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
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.
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).
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Key findings
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.
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
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