NOTE Training On Attentional Bias And Stress Response Nonclinical Social Anxiety In An Individual

Social anxiety refers to a strongly worry and fear emotional reactions and avoidance behaviors for one or more social contexts for individuals. In clinical, social anxiety disorders have attentional bias for threatening information, expressed as preferentially pay attention to the negative emotional cues in environment. The researchers proposed that attentional bias about threat information are not only the product of social anxiety disorders, but also the result that individuals automatically allocate the attention to threat-related stimuli lead to enhance the perception of threat and maintain a high level of anxiety. The purpose of this study is to prove non-clinical social anxiety Individual have the attentional bias to threat stimuli, and use attention training to modify the attentional bias of them, turning to prefer to neutral or positive things, so the social anxiety individuals can avoid generate excessive anxiety reaction and negative emotions. This will benefit the social anxiety individuals have a better live, learning and work.The study included two experiments. The first experiment appled the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale to screen subjects, used30points as the dividing line to distinguish between high and low social anxiety individuals, to test there are attention bias to threat information of non-clinical social anxiety individual or not, utilizing different emotional words and expressions face as stimulis. The results demonstrated that the attentional bias index of high-anxious individuals was significantly bigger than the low-scoring group, namely high-anxious individuals had a much more faster probe to threat stimulus.In the second study, we used the attentional training program based on attentional component theory, employ cognitive control strategy to deliberately change the focus of attention of high-anxious individuals. The programs instruct the individuals to shift away the attention from threat stimulates and pay attention to neutral stimulus, to train the high-anxious individuals to increase the ability of disengaging attention from threat. The non-clinical social anxiety subjects were randomly assigned to three conditions, that is implicit training group, explicit training group and control group. The results showed that, after training the implicit training group reacted significantly faster to invalid social threat words than the other two groups after training, and the anxiety levels of implicit training group and explicit training group was significantly lower than the third group after public speaking task. Thus, only the implicit training group enhanced the capacity of disengaging attention from threat information after attention training.