The Influence Of Social Anxiety On The Stare-in-the-crowd Effect

Cognitive model of anxiety suggests that social anxiety is associated with increased attention to threat and a greater likelihood of reaching a pessimistic interpretation of ambiguous events. Previous studies related on social cues always focused on the facial expressions and neglected a kind of more subtle social cue-gaze direction which has been much more common in everyday life. Eye gaze has been more ambiguous when compared to distinct facial emotion and might therefore leave more room for anxiety specific interpretation and processing biases. The stare-in-the-crowd effect is the higher efficiency of the search for the straight gaze, which can be explained from the evolutionary perspective that direct gaze may contain some important social information which even may prevent the danger and be critical for organisms to survive.In our daily lives, when look at people’s eyes, we tend to occur two cases:He/she did or did not look at you. The former is called direct gaze, and the latter is the averted gaze. As a special gaze direction, direct gaze can transmit various kinds of non-verbal information, e.g., friendship, intimacy, anger and aggression. Social anxiety individuals might evaluate the direct gaze as a kind of threatening stimulus.This study was divided into three experiments, the study one was designed to test whether the stare-in-the-crowd effect would be affected by the participants’social anxiety level (Experiment 1) and whether this kind of influence was related to the threatening level of the direct gaze pictures (Experiment 2). The study two was to explore the neural mechanism of how the stare-in-the-crowd effect would be affected by the participants’social anxiety level.Participants were divided into high social anxiety (HSA) and low social anxiety (LSA) groups by measuring the 27% highest and lowest scores of the Brief Fear of Negative Evaluation Scale and the Interaction Anxiety Scale. The Results of Study 1 demonstrated that the direct gaze targets were detected more efficiently than the averted gaze targets to all the participants. The interaction between gaze direction and group was significant; HSA detected the direct gaze faster than LSA. The subjective threatening evaluation result revealed that direct gaze was more threatening than averted gaze. The implicit threatening evaluation result found that the direct gaze is threatening to the HSA, but it is not to the LSA. These results suggested that high social anxiety individual searched the direct gaze targets faster for that the direct gaze was threatening to them.The study 2 showed that the amplitude of N170 induced by the direct gaze was significantly larger than which was induced by the averted gaze. The interaction between gaze direction and group was significant on the amplitude of LPC. To the HSA, direct gaze induced greater amplitude of LPC. These results suggested that early attention is captured by the direct gaze, but what affected the stare-in-the-crowd effect was late higher cognitive processing.Both the results of Study 1 and Study 2 suggested that the effect of social anxiety level on the stare-in-the-crowd effect was related to threatening of the direct gaze. This kind of influence was derived from the late higher cognitive processing which enhanced the evaluation of the direct gaze.