Acute stress impairs attentional control and emotional processing in social anxiety

Processing emotional faces poses a particular challenge for socially anxious individuals. Acute social stress may further alter attentional allocation and emotional processing, yet the temporal neural dynamics of these changes remain unclear. Using an electroencephalogram (EEG), we examined attentional bias and face processing through an attentional threat bias task and a passive face-viewing task following stress induction. Results showed that acute stress biased a sustained visuospatial attention toward the left visual field, which indicates reduced flexibility in reallocating attention across competing affective stimuli. Stress also broadly reduced event-related potential (ERP) amplitudes and attenuated frontal alpha event-related desynchronization (alpha ERD), suggesting diminished attentional resource availability and cortical control. Notably, early rapid responses to threatening faces remain intact. Together, these findings indicate that acute stress reorganizes attentional processing by depleting resources required for sustained attention and regulatory engagement, potentially exacerbating social information processing vulnerabilities in social anxiety.