Eye-tracking evidence of an association between social anxiety and avoidance of threatening faces in healthy women

Socially anxious individuals are characterized by higher social fears and a sensitivity to signals of rejection. Eye-tracking studies in socially anxious participants without clinical diagnoses provided mixed findings on altered attentional processes. Investigations of gaze behavior in response to socially threatening scenes are scarce. By using eye-tracking technology in a free-viewing task, the present study examined in 108 healthy women the relationship between socially anxious tendencies and gaze orientation to anger and disgust faces and social scenes paired with neutral stimuli. The Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (LSAS) was used to assess social anxiety. Picture pairs were presented for 8000 ms to examine early (<i>probability of first fixation</i>) and late (<i>dwell time</i>) parameters of attention. To induce experiences of failure, participants were confronted with a social stressor. Social anxiety was not related to an initial attention orientation bias toward threatening stimuli, relative to neutral stimuli. However, dwell time bias for anger and disgust faces was negatively correlated with social anxiety. In non-patients, social fears and resulting avoiding behavior seem to go along with turning one's attention away from negative facial expressions and more toward neutral stimuli. This attention pattern was not observed for socially threatening scenes. For faces, our results support the assumption of avoidance of threatening stimuli at later processing stages in high social anxiety. Alternatively, socially anxious individuals may show a relative attentional preference for neutral faces when they are shown simultaneously with threatening faces.