The relationship between attentional bias and attentional control in individuals with high social anxiety: An eye tracking study

• Main Authors: Chia-Yun Cheng, 鄭佳云
• Other Authors: Chi-Wen Liang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2019
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/s45amv

碩士 === 中原大學 === 心理學研究所 === 107 === Research purpose and background: Cognitive-behavioral models of social anxiety assume that attentional bias plays a critical role in the development and maintenance of social anxiety disorder. Previous studies have shown that high socially anxious individuals compared with low socially anxious individuals, may demonstrate facilitated engagement with and difficulty in disengagement from threat. Recent studies indicated that attentional control deficits in socially anxious individuals may be related to the mechanisms underlying attentional bias. According to attentional control theory, anxiety impairs the performance of attentional control functions, particularly in inhibition and shifting. Therefore, socially anxious individuals are assumed to exhibit attentional control deficits and these deficits may cause and maintain threat-related attentional bias. However, there have been few studies investigating the relationship among attentional bias (facilitated engagement and difficulty in disengagement), attentional control (the inhibition and shifting functions), and social anxiety. To sum up, the present study aimed to use behavioral measures to investigate whether high socially anxious individuals show impairments in attentional control (inhibition and shifting), and show attentional bias for threats (facilitated engagement and difficulty in disengagement). Furthermore, this study aimed to examine the relationship among social anxiety, attentional control, and attentional bias. Method: A total of 114 participants (46 males, 68 females, average age=20.44, SD=1.34), including 40 high socially anxious participants, 38 low socially anxious participants, and 36 participants with an intermediate levels of social anxiety completed the experiment. All participants completed the mixed-antisaccade task, the engagement-disengagement task, and self-reported scales for measuring social anxiety, trait and state anxiety, attentional control, and depression. Results: In the mixed-antisaccade task, high socially anxious participants and low socially anxious participants did not differ in their antisaccade latencies or in their error rates. However, high socially anxious participants had larger antisaccade costs than low socially anxious participants. The two groups did not differ in their latency switch costs. In the engagement-disengagement task, the two groups did not differ in the time to engage attention to threatening faces or in the time to disengage from threatening faces. In addition, the time to engage attention to threatening faces was shorter than happy faces, but the time to disengage attention from threatening faces was longer than happy faces in all participants. Correlation analyses showed that all participants’ scores on attentional control scale (subjective evaluation of their own attentional control ability) was not significantly associated to antisaccade costs and shift costs (behavioral measures of attentional control). Furthermore, participants’ antisaccade costs and shift costs did not significantly correlate with the time to engage to threat and the time to disengage from threat (indics of attentional bias). Regression analyses showed that antisaccade costs did not significantly predict the time to engage to and disengage from threats; shift costs also did not significantly predict the time to disengage from threats. In addition, the results showed that attentional control did not moderate the relationship between social anxiety and attentional bias; attentional bias did not mediate the relationship between attentional control and social anxiety. Conclusions: This study suggests that high socially anxious individuals compared with low socially anxious people, demonstrate diminished efficiency of inhibition function but show no significant impairment of shifting function. High socially anxious individuals show no significant threat-related attentional bias compared with low socially anxious individuals. However, this study also reveals that threat stimuli are more likely to attract attention than positive stimuli for all participants. This study also indicates that there is no significant correlation between self-reported and behavioral measures of attentional control, suggesting that the construct of attentional control measured by self-reported scales may differ from that measured by behavioral tasks. In addition, this study suggests that attentional control does not moderate the relationship between social anxiety and threat-related attentional bias; threat-related attentional bias does not mediate the relationship between attentional control and social anxiety.