Influence Of Emotional Faces With Different Orientations On Attention Bias Of Adolescents With Social Anxiety

Social anxiety is a kind of negative emotional experience.It comes into being when the individual tries to communicate with others.Without effective intervention,it will continue to affect people’s physical health,mental health and their social communication.Studies have shown that the average onset period of social anxiety disorder is adolescence.So it is quite necessary to pay attention to the related problems of adolescents’ social anxiety.Emotional faces are the main stimulus materials in social anxiety research.It is found that individuals with social anxiety have attention bias to social threat stimulation.Face orientation occurs naturally with emotional expression.As the closest spatial orientation information between eyes and face,it may be an important clue to evaluate the threat.Does face orientation affect the attention bias of adolescents with social anxiety? The paper will explore the processing characteristics of emotional faces from adolescents with social anxiety,and provide a new perspective for effective intervention of adolescents with social anxiety.In the paper,90 adolescents(46 with high social anxiety and 44 with low social anxiety)were selected to experience two behavioral experiments.In Experiment 1,spatial clues were used to explore the processing characteristics of frontal oriented emotional faces in adolescents with social anxiety.The emotional stimulation were frontal oriented anger,frontal oriented happiness and frontal oriented neutral.The results showed that compared with the low social anxiety group,the response time of high social anxiety group to angry faces(under effective clues)was shorter than that of neutral faces,and negative attention bias was bigger.In Experiment 2,modified spatial clues were used to explore the processing characteristics of laterally oriented emotional faces in adolescents with social anxiety.The emotional stimulation were anger on the left or right,happiness on the left or right,and neutrality on the left or right.The results showed that compared with the low social anxiety group,the response time of the high social anxiety group to the angry face on the side was longer,and the negative attention bias was smaller.It means that adolescents with social anxiety have attention fixation to the lateral angry faces.Through two experiments,the paper found that adolescents with social anxiety have attention enhancement to the obvious targeted threat stimulation(such as frontal anger face)in social situations,and have attention fixation to the possible threat stimulation(such as side anger face)in social situations.Adolescents with social anxiety are more sensitive to threat stimulation in social situations,so they have different attention bias to different targeted threat stimulation,which provides a new perspective for effective intervention of adolescents with social anxiety.