| dc.description.abstract | Social anxiety disorder is a common syndrome characterized by excessive fear of negative evaluation in social situations. Cognitive theories (e.g., Clark & McManus, 2002; Heimberg, Brozovich, & Rapee, 2010) suggest that biases in attention play an important role in maintaining social fears. These models posit that socially anxious individuals focus attention on aspects of themselves (e.g., sensations of physiological arousal) and the social environment (e.g., potentially evaluative facial expressions) which indicate risk of negative appraisal by others. However, few studies have used lateralized event-related potentials (ERPs) to evaluate when these biases occur within stages of information processing. The goal of this study was to utilize ERPs (i.e., N2pc and CDA) during a change detection task in order to examine biases in selection (i.e., N2pc amplitude) and maintenance (i.e., CDA amplitude) of attention toward socially threatening faces in socially anxious subjects. Additionally, the effect of self-focused attention on these biases was examined using false heart rate feedback during the task. As hypothesized, socially anxious subjects showed early and sustained biased attention for disgust faces relative to neutral faces, and non-anxious controls did not show this bias. However, controls showed an early bias (N2pc) for disgust faces when heart rate cues were present, whereas socially anxious subjects showed no bias in this condition. Contrary to the hypotheses, controls showed an ipsilateral delay activity after being cued to attend to one hemifield, perhaps indicating active suppression of contralateral distractors. These findings and supplementary data are discussed in light of cognitive models of social anxiety disorder, recent empirical findings, and treatment. | |
