Characteristics And Neural Mechanisms Of Attention Bias And Attention Control In Social Anxiety Individuals And The Exploration On Their Relationship

With the increase of pressure in learning,living and working,the prevalence of social anxiety has gradually increased.According to the theories on attentional bias and attentional control in individuals with social anxiety,social anxiety is not just affected by the "bottom-up",stimulus,but also by the "top-down" regulatory power of attention control.Social Anxiety(SA)refers to the abnormal feelings of intense worry,nervousness or fear one experiences in one or more social situations,which is usually accompanied by avoidance in behavior,but functional damages unfound.Attention bias(AB)refers to a phenomenon that a person is highly sensitive to a particular stimulus and it is accompanied by selective attention,and that the individual has difficulty relieving his attention from the target or shifting attention to other targets.Attention control(AC)refers to the ability to regulate attention as to overcome the automatic emotional response.A lot of researches have been conducted about AB and AC of SA,but researchers are divided over the existence of attention bias in social anxiety.Moreover,regarding the features of attention control in social anxiety,many more researches are focused on scale analysis.In comparison,fewer researches are conducted with experimental methods to explore the relationship between social anxiety and,attentional bias and attentional control.On the basis of precedent studies,this study focuses on the perspectives of attention bias and attention control.The data are collected through questionnaires and experiments.Behavioral experiment,eye movement experiment and EEG experiment are made.The statistics are analyzed,respectively,with SPSS,CMA,ALE and LISREL,to investigate the features of attention bias and attention control in social anxiety,and the cognitive neural mechanism of attention bias and attention control in social anxiety;and to construct relational pattern between social anxiety,and attention bias and attention control,which is based on attention bias correction experiment.The study is divided into four parts,nine studies.The first part explores the characteristics of the attention bias in individuals with social anxiety,which is made up of two studies.Study 1.The method of meta-analysis is used to deal with the contradictory research results of attention bias in social anxiety.Study 2.Eye movement tracking experiment is performed to explore the difference between individuals with social anxiety and those without,where free viewing paradigm is used.The second part discusses the characteristics of attention control in individuals with social anxiety,which is made up of three studies.Study 3.Large sample survey is carried out to complete the localized revising of the attention control scale so as to investigate the regulation effect of attention control over the fear of evaluation and social anxiety.Study 4.Spatial cue paradigm and Flanker are applied in the behavioral experiments to explore the characteristic behavior pattern of social anxiety.Study 5.Anti-saccades paradigm is used to discover eye movement pattern characteristic of social anxiety.The third part explores the cognitive neural characteristics of social anxiety in terms of attention bias and attention control,two studies included.Study 6.ERP experiments are performed to explore the ERPs in individuals with social anxiety.Study 7.In this study,meta-analysis is used to investigate the differences between individuals with social anxiety in terms of attention bias and attention control in fMRI and the individuals without social anxiety.The fourth part inspects the relational pattern between social anxiety,and attention bias and attention control,which is made up of two studies.Study 8.The dot probe paradigm is used so that attentional bias modification is carried out,and that the data of social anxiety,attention control,attentional bias are collected before and after the experiment,to explore the role of attentional control in attention bias correction and social anxiety mitigation,and to construct a relational model among the three.Study 9.On the basis of the positive effects of attention bias modification in study 8,reward mechanism is combined into the procedure of attention bias modification to find out whether reward mechanism affect the relational model of the three.The conclusions are as follows:(1)Individuals with social anxiety is vigilant to the negative stimulus in the earlier stage,but display avoidance during the later stage.Faced with the positive stimulus,they often adopt avoidance behaviors.(2)According to the scales,attention control can significantly predict social anxiety negatively,and in some way,mediates fear of evaluation and social anxiety.Furthermore,in terms of behavior pattern and eye movements,individuals with social anxiety are weaker in attention control than those without.(3)ERP and fMRI are used to investigate the cognitive neural characteristics of social anxiety in terms of attention bias and attention control,and it is discovered that the VPP and P300 amplitude to attention control over negative stimuli is significantly more on the negative side,and that the amygdala is abnormally active;anterior wedge activity relating to attention control shows significant reduction.(4)A multiple mediating model of social anxiety,attentional bias and attentional control based on attentional bias correction is constructed.