The effect of uncertainty on attentional bias in subclinical worriers: Evidence from reaction time and eye-tracking.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: High-worry individuals have been assumed to show attentional bias towards threat, particularly under high uncertainty. This study experimentally investigated the effect of uncertainty on attentional bias in subclinical worriers. METHODS: A visual dot-probe task combined with eye-tracking was used to assess participants' attentional bias towards blurred and unfiltered stimuli. Fifty high-worry and 47 low-worry participants were randomly assigned to either the high- or low-uncertainty threat condition. Aversive noise bursts were delivered either unpredictably (the high-uncertainty threat condition) or predictably (the low-uncertainty threat condition) during the visual dot-probe task. RESULTS: In the low-uncertainty threat condition, high-worry participants exhibited enhanced attentional engagement towards blurred pictures compared to low-worry participants. They also had shorter initial fixation latencies on blurred pictures than on unfiltered pictures. In the high-uncertainty threat condition, high-worry participants demonstrated more difficulty in disengaging from threatening pictures compared to low-worry participants. LIMITATION: First, this study used a nonclinical sample. Second, the power was limited with regard to the analysis of eye-movement data. Third, anxiety and worry induced by noise bursts were measured using subjective rating scales only. Fourth, some picture characteristics, such as luminosity and complexity, were not controlled. Finally, uncertainty related to delivery of noise bursts and pictures were both manipulated dichotomously. CONCLUSION: This study highlights the importance of uncertainty in the maintenance of attentional bias towards threat-related pictures in high-worry individuals.

Inhibitory attentional control under cognitive load in social anxiety: An investigation using a novel dual-task paradigm.

Research suggests that socially anxious (SA) individuals exhibit poorer attentional inhibition than their non-anxious (NA) counterparts. Attentional control theory presumes that cognitive load worsens the adverse effects of anxiety on attentional inhibition. However, previous studies examined the effects of cognitive load on attentional inhibition in social anxiety yielded inconsistent results. In this study, cognitive load was manipulated by adding a 1-back (low cognitive load) and 2-back task (high cognitive load) to the emotional antisaccade task, investigating the effects of cognitive load on attentional inhibition in the presence of social evaluative stimuli in SA and NA individuals. Results revealed that cognitive load improved the efficiency but impeded the effectiveness of inhibitory attentional control in SA participants. Under high cognitive load, SA participants made more erroneous saccades for threat-related than nonthreat-related faces while NA participants showed no differences in error rates among different face types. Moreover, regardless of cognitive levels, SA participants had shorter saccade latencies for angry faces than happy and neutral faces. NA participants did not show differences in saccade latencies among different face types. Implications of these findings for understanding the role that cognitive load plays in the processes of attentional control and interventions for social anxiety are discussed.

Apprehension about the future: Investigating the phenomenological characteristics of episodic future thinking in socially anxious adolescents.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Social anxiety is a future-oriented mood characterized by apprehension about others' negative evaluations in anxiety-provoking social situations that may occur in the future. Episodic future thinking (EFT) is a form of future-oriented cognition that allows a pre-experiencing of our personal futures. The literature suggests that anxious individuals show increased negative expectancies about future events. However, few studies have been conducted on EFT in social anxiety. The current study investigated the phenomenological characteristics of EFT in adolescents with high and low social anxiety. METHODS: Twenty-two high social anxiety (HSA) and 24 low social anxiety (LSA) adolescents simulated one anxiety-provoking social event and one neutral event. They then rated the phenomenological characteristics of the events. RESULTS: HSA adolescents imagined anxiety-provoking social events from an observer perspective more than LSA adolescents. HSA adolescents also imagined anxiety-provoking social events as more negative and containing less clear contextual details than LSA adolescents. In contrast, no group differences were found for neutral events. Moreover, participants imagined more self-referential information for anxiety-provoking social events than neutral events. HSA participants imagined less other-referential information than LSA participants, regardless of the event type. LIMITATIONS: This study used a subclinical sample with high and low social anxiety. The sample size was small, and only adolescents aged 15-17 years were included. It is difficult to generalize the present findings across different anxiety-provoking social events. The specificity of EFT was not evaluated. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings highlight the importance of EFT in the psychopathology of adolescent social anxiety.

Attentional control deficits in social anxiety: Investigating inhibition and shifting functions using a mixed antisaccade paradigm.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Attentional control has recently been assumed to play a critical role in the generation and maintenance of threat-related attentional bias and social anxiety. The present study aimed to investigate whether socially anxious (SA) individuals show impairments in attentional control functions, particularly in inhibition and shifting. METHODS: Forty-two SA and 41 non-anxious (NA) participants completed a mixed antisaccade task, a variant of the antisaccade task that is used to investigate inhibition as well as shifting functions. RESULTS: The results showed that, overall, SA participants had longer antisaccade latencies than NA participants, but the two groups did not differ in their antisaccade error rates. Moreover, in the single-task block, SA participants had longer latencies than NA participants for antisaccade but not prosaccade trials. In the mixed-task block, the SA participants had longer latencies than the NA participants for both task types. The two groups did not differ in their latency switch costs in the mixed-task blocks. LIMITATIONS: First, this study was conducted using a non-clinical sample of undergraduate students. Second, the antisaccade task measures primarily oculomotor inhibition. Third, this study did not include the measure of state anxiety to rule out the effects of state anxiety on the present findings. CONCLUSIONS: This study suggests that SA individuals demonstrate diminished efficiency of inhibition function but show no significant impairment of shifting function. However, in the mixed-task condition, SA individuals may exhibit an overall reduction in processing efficiency due to the higher task difficulty.

Sustained visual attention for competing emotional stimuli in social anxiety: An eye tracking study.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Numerous studies have supported attentional biases toward social threats in socially anxious individuals. The aim of the present study was to investigate the time-course of sustained attention for multiple emotional stimuli using a free-viewing paradigm in social anxiety. METHODS: Thirty-two socially anxious (SA) and 30 non-anxious (NA) participants completed the free-viewing task. Participants were presented with a face array composed of angry, sad, happy and neutral faces for 10 s in each trial. Eye movements were recorded throughout the trial to assess the time-course of attentional processing. RESULTS: Although SA participants did not exhibit initial orienting bias, they had higher fixation probability for angry faces during the 250-1000 ms time intervals, relative to NA participants. SA participants also maintained their attention longer than NA participants did when angry faces were initially fixated upon. Moreover, NA participants showed higher fixation probability for happy faces during the 6-8 s after stimulus onset. We failed to observe attentional avoidance of threat in SA participants. LIMITATIONS: First, this study used a non-clinical sample. Second, the stimuli used in this study were static. CONCLUSIONS: The present findings suggest that, relative to non-anxious individuals, socially anxious individuals are characterized by enhanced engagement with social threat at an early stage of processing and difficulty in disengaging from social threat once their initial attention is located on it. Conversely, non-anxious individuals are characterized by enhanced engagement with positive stimuli at a later stage of processing.

Effects of attention bias modification with short and long stimulus-duration: A randomized experiment with individuals with subclinical social anxiety.

This study investigated the differential effects of two attention bias modification (ABM) with different stimulus durations. Seventy-two undergraduates with subclinical social anxiety were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: an ABM condition with either a 100-ms or a 500-ms stimulus duration (ABM-100/ ABM-500) or an attention placebo (AP) condition with either a 100-ms or a 500-ms stimulus duration (AP-100/ AP-500). Participants completed the pre-assessments, eight attentional training sessions, and post-assessments. A modified Posner paradigm was used to assess changes in attentional processing. After completion of attentional training, the ABM-100 group significantly speeded up their responses to 100-ms invalid trials, regardless of the word type. The ABM-100 group also exhibited significant reduced latencies to 500-ms invalid social threat trials and a marginally significant reduced latencies to 500-ms invalid neutral trials. The ABM-500 group showed significant reduced latencies to 500-ms invalid social threat trials. Both ABMs significantly reduced participants' fear of negative evaluations and interactional anxiousness relative to their comparative AP. The effects on social anxiety did not differ between the two ABMs. This study suggests that although both ABMs using short and long stimulus durations reduce some aspects of social anxiety, they influence participants' attentional disengagement in different ways.

Using cognitive modelling to investigate the psychological processes of the Go/NoGo discrimination task in male abstinent heroin misusers.

AIMS: To use cognitive modelling to investigate psychological processes underlying decision-making in male abstinent heroin misusers (AHMs). DESIGN: A case-control study design. SETTING: A drug misuse treatment centre in Taiwan. PARTICIPANTS: Eighty-eight male AHMs and 48 male controls. MEASUREMENTS: Four parameters representing the attention to wins, learning rate, response sensitivity and incentive of heroin-related stimuli from the modified Go/NoGo discrimination task. FINDINGS: A modified cue-dependent learning (CD) model with four parameters representing attention to wins, learning rate, response sensitivity and incentive of heroin-related stimuli had a lower value of the sum of Bayesian information criterion (showing a better fit) than the original CD model (9555.50 versus 11,192.22, P < 0.001). The AHM group had a higher value of the heroin-incentive parameter than the control group (0.26 versus -1.66, P < 0.05). The attention to wins and heroin-incentive parameters were associated positively with total commission rate and negatively with total omission rate in the AHM group (P < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS: Male abstinent heroin misusers appear to be more influenced by heroin-related stimuli during decision-making than males with no history of heroin misuse.

The hierarchical model of social interaction anxiety and depression: the critical roles of fears of evaluation.

In this paper, we articulate a hierarchical model of social interaction anxiety (SIA) and depression to account for their comorbidity and the uniqueness of SIA. First, negative affect (NA) and positive affect (PA) are conceptualized as general factors shared by SIA and depression; the fear of negative evaluation (FNE) is operationalized as the specific factor, which accounts for more of the variance in SIA than in depression, and the fear of positive evaluation (FPE) is operationalized as the factor unique to SIA. FPE is the key feature that differentiates SIA from depression. Second, the proposed hierarchical model describes structural relationships among these factors, in which the higher-level factors (i.e., high NA and low PA) represent the vulnerability markers of both SIA and depression and the lower-level factors (i.e., FNE and FPE) are the dimensions of specific cognitive features. In addition, an alternative model, in which all of the relationships are the same, except that FPE is operationalized as a specific factor, is proposed to clarify the role of FPE. The results from the hierarchical regression and the structural equation modeling support the hypothesized hierarchical model. Further theoretical and practical implications for FPE and the multilevel model are discussed.

Absence of a positive bias in social anxiety: the application of a directed forgetting paradigm.

The present study used a directed forgetting paradigm to investigate whether socially anxious individuals show a memory bias for social information. Socially anxious and non-anxious participants viewed three types of words: socially negative, socially positive, and neutral. Each word was presented on a computer screen and was followed by a cue instructing participants to either remember or forget the word. A free recall test and a recognition test were then administered by asking participants to recall and recognize both "to-be-remembered" and "to-be-forgotten" words. When compared to non-anxious participants, socially anxious participants showed a greater directed forgetting effect for socially positive words in the free recall test, indicating that socially anxious individuals more easily forget socially positive words than do non-anxious individuals. This result suggests that socially anxious individuals lack the positive bias (i.e., difficulty in forgetting socially positive information) displayed by non-anxious individuals.