Electrophysiological correlates of attentional bias towards threat in children with high levels of social anxiety

Pediatric social anxiety is characterized by attentional biases (AB) towards social threats. This study used a new response-based calculation method to assess AB from response times (RT) in a visual dot-probe task and electroencephalography (EEG) to explore its electrophysiological correlates. Twenty, high socially anxious children (HSA) (mean [M ] = 10.1 years; standard deviation [SD] = 1.01) were compared with 22 healthy control children (HC) (M = 10.20 years; SD = 1.30) matched in age and gender. Participants had to identify targets preceded by disgust-neutral, happy-neutral, or neutral-neutral pairs of faces. RT and electroencephalograms were recorded throughout the task. While no significant group difference was found at the behavioral level, principal component analyses performed on EEG data revealed that event-related potentials for threat-related stimuli were impacted by social anxiety. Analyses indicated a larger N170 amplitude in response to all facial stimuli in HC when compared to the HSA. However, we found increased P2 amplitudes for disgust-neutral pairs compared with happy-neutral pairs in has only. Then, thasHSA group showed increased P2 amplitudes for targets following disgusted faces on the opposite side of the screen compared with targets appearing on the same side of the screen. These results suggest that HSA may display an increased anchorage of attention on threatening stimuli and need more effort to disengage their attentional focus from threats and to perform the task correctly. Taken together, our data confirmed the presence of AB in children with high levels of social anxiety, which are reflected by increased neural processing during the confrontation to faces depicting a potential threatening expression.