The Characteristics Of Attentional Bias Of Social Anxiety Individuals Under Different Conscious Threshold Levels

On the basis of the literature review of previous studies about social anxiety and attentional bias, thisstudy researched the characteristics of attentional bias of social anxiety individuals under the conscioussubthreshold and superthreshold, proved the relationship among different social anxiety levels, differentstimuli types, different experimental situations and attentional bias for social anxiety individuals.Using the literature method, experimental method and other methods comprehensively, this studyselected81university students in grade one. The experimental materials of this study is the emotional facespictures of emotional material database written by Luo yuejia in2005. The study included two experiments.In experimentⅠ,we employed a mixed design of three factors,i.e.2(social anxiety level: high social anxietygroup, low social anxiety group) x2(experimental situation: the threatening, no threatening）×2(stimulating type: threatening emotional faces, happy emotional faces, neutral emotional faces pairingwith threatening emotional faces, happy emotional faces pairing with threatening emotional faces) toinvestigate the characteristics of attentional bias of social anxiety individuals under the conscioussubthreshold. In experimentⅡwe used the same design as experimentⅠto investigate the characteristics ofattentional bias of social anxiety individuals under the conscious superthreshold.The main conclusions of this study are the following.(1) The high social anxiety group is alert toward the threatening faces in the conscious subthreshold.Compared with the nonthreatening experiment situation, the high social anxiety group is alerter toward thethreatening face in the threatening experiment situation. That is to say, the reaction time of the high socialanxiety group to the threatening faces is shorter than happy or neutral faces. And the low Social anxietygroup in the threatening and nonthreatening experimental situations do not show attentional bias.(2) The high social anxiety group avoids the threatening faces in the conscious superthreshold.Compared with the nonthreatening experiment situation, the high social anxiety group avoids thethreatening faces more significantly in the threatening experiment situation. That is to say, the reaction timeof the high social anxiety group to the threatening faces is longer than happy or neutral faces. And the lowSocial anxiety group in the threatening and nonthreatening experimental situations do not show attentionalbias. (3)There is a conspicuous differences between the characteristics of attentional bias of social anxietyindividuals under the conscious superthreshold and subthreshold.