The Processing Bias Of Untrustworthy Emotional Faces In Social Anxiety Individuals

Individuals with social anxiety often show processing bias to threatening stimuli.Information processing bias plays an important role in the onset and development of social anxiety.In social situations,threats related specifically to social anxiety mainly include threatening faces and words.At present,the research on the attentional bias of social anxiety to threatening faces mainly focuses on anger,disgust and contempt faces as stimulus materials,while the research on the attentional bias of untrustworthy faces is still unclear.In this study,behavioral experiments and eye tracking techniques were used to examine the processing characteristics of social anxiety people on different credible emotional faces,To explore the mechanism of social anxiety anxiety on different credible emotional face processing,in order to provide reference and enlightenment for the intervention and treatment of social anxiety.This study consists of three experiments: Pre-experiment: 150 college students were randomly recruited as experimental subjects.The subjects were asked to judge the credibility of facial presentation(1 = very unreliable,7 = very credible),and to establish five emotional types of facial credible material database for follow-up research.Experiment1: Using Scales for screening subjects,individuals with high social anxiety grouping and low social anxiety grouping according to the scale scores.the subjects were asked to judge whether the credibility and faces of the presented faces were seen in the first stage,and the accuracy and reaction time data of the face credibility judgment and recognition were collected from the behavioral level.Experiment2: Participants(Same as experiment 1).Participants were asked to carefully observe the presented faces,and collect the first gaze point,total gaze duration and total gaze times eye movement index data from the visual processing level.The conclusions are as followes: Experiment 1: The study found that the high social anxiety group and the low social anxiety group judged the credibility of emotional faces(neutral,smiling,fearing,sadness)and recognition of emotionalfaces,for the untrusted face with threat information,the correct rate and response time of the social anxiety group is significantly higher(longer)than the social anxiety low group test.However,for anger in the experiment,compared with the low social anxiety group,the high social anxiety group had higher accuracy and longer reaction time in judging credible faces.Experiment 2: The study found that compared with the low social anxiety group,the high-group subjects' first gaze points were more biased toward the untrustworthy emotional faces(neutral,smile,fear,sadness)that transmitted the threat signal,and the social anxiety high group gaze transmitted threat signals.The total gaze time and total number of gaze points of untrustworthy emotional faces(neutral,smile,fear,sadness)were also significantly longer(more)than those with low anxiety social grouping;However,the study of the face of anger sentiment found that the total gaze duration and total gaze time of the trusted face were higher(more)than the social anxiety low group.The above results show that:The sensitivity of individuals with high social anxiety to threat signals enables them to allocate more cognitive resources to process threat information in complex situations,which shows the processing bias to threat information.