The Effect of Social Anxiety on Top-Down Attentional Orienting to Emotional Faces
The Effect of Social Anxiety on Top-Down Attentional Orienting to Emotional Faces
复制标题
DOI：
10.1037/emo0000764
复制
发表时间：
2022-04-01
期刊：
影响因子：
4.2
通讯作者：
Goodhew, Stephanie C.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Delchau, Hannah L.;Christensen, Bruce K.;Goodhew, Stephanie C.
维持社交焦虑的基本因素之一是对威胁性面部表情的偏向关注。通常，这种偏见被概念化为由过度活跃的自下而上注意力系统驱动的。然而，这可能忽视了自上而下的注意力在调节这种自下而上的偏见方面的作用。在这里，自上而下的机制在将注意力引导到情绪面孔方面的作用是通过修改后的点探测任务进行评估的，其中参与者在每次试验中都被给予自上而下的提示（“快乐”或“愤怒”）来关注快乐或愤怒的面孔，并且被提示的面孔要么呈现另一种情绪（愤怒，快乐）的面孔，要么呈现中性的面孔。这项研究发现，社交焦虑与将注意力转移到暗示的愤怒面孔上的差异无关。然而，社交焦虑水平较高的参与者，当与愤怒的面孔配对时，注意力转向暗示的快乐面孔时会选择性受损，但与中性面孔配对时则不会。结果表明，自上而下的注意力可用于将注意力集中在情绪面孔上，但较高水平的社交焦虑与存在威胁时自上而下的注意力控制的选择性缺陷有关。
One of the fundamental factors maintaining social anxiety is biased attention toward threatening facial expressions. Typically, this bias has been conceptualized as driven by an overactive bottom-up attentional system; however, this potentially overlooks the role of top-down attention in being able to modulate this bottom-up bias. Here, the role of top-down mechanisms in directing attention toward emotional faces was assessed with a modified dot-probe task, in which participants were given a top-down cue ("happy" or "angry") to attend to a happy or angry face on each trial, and the cued face was either presented with a face of the other emotion (angry, happy) or a neutral face. This study found that social anxiety was not associated with differences in shifting attention toward cued angry faces. However, participants with higher levels of social anxiety were selectively impaired in attentional shifting toward a cued happy face when it was paired with an angry face, but not when paired with a neutral face. The results indicate that top-down attention can be used to orient attention to emotional faces, but that higher levels of social anxiety are associated with selective deficits in top-down control of attention in the presence of threat.