Attentional Bias in Social Anxiety: Manipulation of Stimulus Duration and Social-evaluative Anxiety

This study investigated the nature of pre-attentive and conscious attentional processing to different categories of threatening words in a non-clinical socially anxious sample. Individuals high (n = 41) and low (n = 41) in social avoidance and distress, as measured by the Social Avoidance and Distress Scale (SAD), performed a visual dot-probe task which included four word groups; negative evaluation, social situations, somatic sensation and physical threat. Participants completed masked trials (14 ms + masking for 486 ms), followed by unmasked trials (500 ms/no mask), under conditions of either social-evaluation or non-evaluation. The results showed that in the social-evaluation condition, high socially anxious individuals, in comparison to the low socially anxious, demonstrated an attentional bias towards masked physical threat words. There were no further attentional processing differences between the social anxiety groups to masked or unmasked stimuli, in either experimental condition. The results suggest that theories of social anxiety might need to accommodate biases to physical threat cues.