Anxiety
Do socially anxious people see neutral faces as threatening?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
After reading a negative sentence about themselves, socially anxious students showed stronger sustained brain responses to, and more negative ratings of, perfectly neutral faces.
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
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Key findings
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.
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
How this study connects
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