Selective attention to angry faces in clinical social phobia
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Updated: Aug 26, 2026

Measuring Attentional Biases for Threat in Children and Adults
Published on: October 19, 2014
Karin Mogg1, Pierre Philippot, Brendan P Bradley
1Department of Psychology, University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom. k.mogg@soton.ac.uk
Abstract:
This study investigated the time course of attentional responses to emotional facial expressions in a clinical sample with social phobia. With a visual probe task, photographs of angry, happy, and neutral faces were presented at 2 exposure durations: 500 and 1250 ms. At 500 ms, the social phobia group showed enhanced vigilance for angry faces, relative to happy and neutral faces, in comparison with normal controls. In the 1250-ms condition, there were no significant attentional biases in the social phobia group. Results are consistent with a bias in initial orienting to threat cues in social anxiety. Findings are discussed in relation to recent cognitive models of anxiety disorders.
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