Eye Tracking and Social Anxiety
These days it’s impossible to turn on the television without seeing an ad for social anxiety medication. The sad little animated lump rolling along the screen reminds us that it’s one of the most prevalent psychiatric conditions, affecting a large swath of the population.
A recent study focusing on the subject explored how socially anxious individuals react to socially threatening stimuli, pointing out that those with social anxiety have more trouble disengaging from these socially threatening stimuli and, instead, actually obsess over them, sending them further into an anxious state. Attention is usually directed away from stimuli that people have already seen and processed, but individuals in high states of anxiety tend to have difficulty disassociating, and this creates a vicious circle of threat then anxiety, anxiety and then threat.
According to the study, completed by the Departments of Psychology at Louisiana State and Florida State Universities, much remains unknown about attention disengagement from threat among individuals with social anxiety, and so researchers set out with eye tracking technology to learn more about it. Forty-six undergraduates, thirty of whom were women, participated in the study, each completing a pre-screening conducted in their psychology classes that included the test determining their rating on a social anxiety scale.
The participants were then shown a variety of photos showing human faces paired with non-facial photos matched to the facial photos on dimensions of threat, valence, and arousal. Four images were shown on a computer screen at a time – one facial picture with three non-facial ones. Every third round consisted of a filler trial made up of entirely non-facial photos. Some faces showed disgust while others showed happiness, and each was rated on their levels of threat, valence, and arousal.
As the study subjects viewed each face, their eye movements were recorded with an Applied Science Laboratory series 5000 eye tracker equipped with magnetic head tracking. The researchers recorded the length of time each subject looked at a face, monitoring for fixations and saccades, and what they found was that the socially anxious participants had more difficulty disengaging from the “disgust” faces.
The results suggest that difficulty disengaging from the disgust faces may not reflect difficulty disengaging from social clues altogether, but that the data implies that the observed difficulty may be specific to social threat in particular. According to the research, it seems that this difficulty from disengaging from social threat may play an important role in the presence and intensity of social anxiety.
Difficulty Disengaging Attention from Social Threat in Social Anxiety
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