Attentional Bias In Non-clinical Social Anxiety

Social Anxiety Disorder is marked and persistent fear of certain or most social situations.Different foundings about the relationship between social anxiety and attentional bias have brought about controversies. This study examined the attentional bias of social anxiety through experimental method.The sensitivity of words and facial expressions as different experimental materials and the time course were examined.Two experiments constitute the study.65 college students were selected as subjects according to the FNE scores, who were divided into high social anxiety group (HSA) and low social anxiety group (LSA) while gender balance is taken into account.The first hypothesis:HSA will avoid threatening informations remarkably, which will have a more significant effect using facial stimuli compared to using word stimuli, while LSA will not have this attentional bias. 28 qualified subjects, 13 for HSA and 15 for LSA, participated in the experiment and the data analysis. Subjects were required to perform in the probe detection task, which including two parts, word part and facial part. We found HSA showed a longer RT to negative stimuli. Also we found the stimuli type has a significant effect in the facial part but not word part, which testified expression face is a more sensitive index in probe detection task to distinguish subjects' attentional bias. LSA didn't show any attentional bias.The second hypothesis: under the condition of 150ms SOA, HSA will have a remarkable attentional bias to threatening informations, whereas the SOA is 500ms, HSA will show an avoidence. LSA will show no attentional bias.34 qualified subjects, 17 for HAS, 17 for LSA, were required to perform the facial probe detection task, the SOAs were 150ms and 500ms, which arranged randomly and evenly in the task. We found that under the condition of 500ms SOA, HSA showed a marked longer RT towards threatening facial stimuli, while LSA didn't show any attentional bias. It's notable that under the condition of 150ms SOA, neither HSA nor LSAshows any attentional bias, and the reaction time is longer than under condition of 500ms SOA.