Interpretation Bias Of Ambiguous In High And Low Social Anxiety Individuals

Social anxiety disorder is characterized by a tendency to interpret ambiguous social cues as negative or threatening.Cognitive models of social anxiety disorders assume that cognitive bias is the processing of social information constitute important factors in the etiology and maintenance of this disorder,and cognitive bias promote and maintain this condition.The models emphasized that interpretation bias is the key reason for social anxiety disorder.Clinical social anxiety disorder and non-clinical high social anxiety only difference in level of social anxiety,and this difference is in quantity,not the difference of quality.Therefore,they share the same interpretation bias.Research in interpretation biases in social anxiety can be broadly divided into two lines of studies.The first includes studies on interpretation of socially relevant verbal stimuli,such as descriptions of ambiguous social scenarios,or ambiguous sentences with social content.In socially anxious versus non-anxious participants,these studies generally find a bias towards negative interpretation of ambiguous,socially information.The second line of studies focuses on biased interpretation of facial expression of emotion,which belongs to non-verbal stimulus.Because of difference in experiment materials,experimental task setting,results are mixed.Recently,studies have begun to use computerized morphing procedures to generate systematic ambiguity in facial expressions and examine biases in emotion identification and classification among socially anxiety individuals.In this study,use morph software generates ambiguous faces,tested whether interpretation of ambiguous faces differs between participants with high social anxiety and low social anxiety in university students.In first study,high and low social anxiety participants completed an emotion recognition task in which they judged ambiguous morphed faces as happy or angry.Participants with high social anxiety judge a higher proportion of the faces as angry compared to low social anxiety participants,while no reaction time bias manifested.Participants with low social anxiety judge a higher proportion of the face as happy,and were faster to judge faces as happy than angry.These findings provided evidence for a angry bias in resolving emotional ambiguity in facial expressions among individuals with high social anxiety,and the rate of interpretation bias is different between high and low social anxiety groups.In second study,high and low social anxiety participants completed an emotion recognition task in which they judged ambiguous morphed faces as happy or disgust.Participants with high social anxiety judge a higher proportion of the faces as disgust compared to low social anxiety participants,and were slower to judge faces as happy compared to disgust.Participants with low social anxiety judge a higher proportion of the face as happy,while no reaction time bias manifested.These findings suggest that a disgust bias in high social anxiety,and the rate of interpretation bias different between high and low social anxiety groups.The former two studies provide evidence for a negative bias in high social anxiety from a behavioral level.Those findings provide evidence that high social anxiety not only have angry bias,but also have disgust bias,which indicate that high social anxiety have negative interpretation bias,and the interpretation bias is reflected in the speed.The last study provided evidence for negative bias from a neural level.In this study,measured event-related brain potentials(ERP)in response to ambiguous faces which were preceded by affective context information(negative,positive,neutral).This study combine faces processing with really social scenarios,which make study more ecological validity.ERP analysis revealed that high social anxiety showed elevated P1 amplitudes in response ambiguous faces,which means high social anxiety show hypervigilance for faces in general.On the face specific component N170,there was no significant difference between the high and low social anxiety group.There also have no context difference in high and low social anxiety.In conclusion,compared with the low social anxiety group,the high social anxiety group showed negative bias in both behavioral and neuropsychological aspects.