Survey attentional bias to dynamic facial expression with eye tracker technology in socially anxious individuals and non-anxious controls

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 M.Sc. in clinical psychology, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad

2 Associate professor of psychology, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad

3 Assistant professor of psychology, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad

Abstract

Introduction: The processing of social information is a necessary means by which humans obtain information about their social world. The way in which individuals attend to and interpret social information has an obvious impact on the conclusions they draw about social interactions. Such information comes in a variety of forms, including non-verbal behaviors, prosodic cues in voice, and facial expressions. This study utilized eye-movement data to compare attention to emotional facial expressions in individuals with and without social anxiety disorder.
 Materials and Methods: Statistical society comprised total of patients with social anxiety disorder aged 18-30 that had been referred to clinic of Ferdowsi University of Mashhad in second half of 1390 and first half of 1391, as well as the normal population included all the normal persons aged 18-30. Participants were 30 people with a primary diagnosis of social phobia, and 30 non-anxious controls, who completed a demographic questionnaire, Social Phobia Inventory, Beck Depression Inventory, and a dot-probe task to measure visual attention to dynamic emotional facial expressions using SMI RED250 eye-tracking device. The data were analyzed by using SPSS software (version 16) and ANOVA and T tests.
 Results: Socially anxious individual had significantly faster vigilance for threatening facial expressions than non anxious control (P<0.05). Social anxious participants show significantly more avoidance to threatening faces in the first 500 ms of the stimulus presentation than non- anxious controls. Over the course of the stimulus presentation (3000 ms), participants with social anxiety disorder continued to attend to social threat cues longer than non-anxious controls.
 Conclusion: Individual with social anxiety disorder form negative assumptions about how other people see them, and these assumptions cause a particular attentiveness to threatening environmental cues.
 

Keywords

Journal of Fundamentals of Mental Health
Volume 16, Issue 61 - Serial Number 61
March and April 2014
Pages 22-33

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