Automatic avoidance of faces primed by threatening expressions in social anxiety: Sustained but not early attentional effects in an eye-tracking paradigm

Social anxiety involves persistent fears of social situations and a heightened sensitivity to signs of disapproval. Eye-tracking studies involving socially anxious individuals without clinical diagnoses have yielded heterogeneous results regarding alterations of attentional processes. Cognitive models of anxiety propose that early, automatic processes play a crucial role in attentional orientation. To date, no eye-tracking research has explored the relationship between social anxiety and the automatic processing of facial stimuli preceded by masked emotional expressions using eye-tracking technology. To address this research gap, the present study examined gaze orientation toward pairs of happy faces as a function of prime emotion and social anxiety in 105 healthy women. Happy faces were primed with angry, disgusted, happy, or neutral expressions (prime presentation duration: 50 ms). Subjective non-awareness of emotional primes was assessed by interview. The participants had the task to make dichotomous authenticity choices concerning happy facial expressions. Socially anxious tendencies were not correlated with authenticity judgments or initial attention allocation toward happy faces as a function of prime emotion. However, dwell time on happy faces preceded by very brief displays of anger and disgust was negatively correlated with socially anxious tendencies. Heightened social fears in women seem associated with avoidance tendencies with regard to happy faces that briefly show a threatening expression. These results align with the hypothesis that individuals with high social anxiety exhibit avoidance of threatening stimuli at later processing stages and suggest that these avoidance tendencies may occur even when the threatening information was perceived automatically.