Temporal trends in attention disengagement from social threat as a function of social anxiety

Difficulty disengaging attention from threat has been observed in some anxious samples, but the evidence to date is mixed. The current study examines temporal trends in attention disengagement and compares this construct across multiple forms of social threat.

Participants (85 adults with a principal diagnosis of social anxiety disorder) completed a spatial cueing task with four image categories (angry faces, disapproving faces, neutral faces, neutral objects). Attention disengagement was assessed via reaction time (RT) over 256 trials.

Participants with greater social anxiety exhibited an initial delay in attention disengagement from disapproving faces that habituated over the course of the task. RTs to angry and neutral stimuli did not differ as a function of social anxiety.

The current task only allowed for examining speed of attention disengagement, and thus we were unable to compare our results to trajectories of speed at which participants orient towards threat. Additionally, disapproving facial images were created for this paradigm and may benefit from further validation.

Findings suggest that social anxiety is associated with an initial delay in attention disengagement from social threat that resolves over the course of repeated exposures to such stimuli. Treatment implications are discussed.