Neural mechanisms of processing emotional information from faces and voices in social phobia

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Patients suffering from social phobia show information processing biases and increased brain responses during the processing of socially threatening stimuli, such as angry faces and prosody. However, it is unknown to what extent automatic brain responses to social threat signals in social phobia depend on cognitive resources, threat-relevance, modality and intensity of emotional social stimuli and whether brain responses can be modified by successful psychotherapy, such as cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT). Based on stimuli, methods and results from the first funding period, the current project extends the research questions into the clinical domain. The aim is to investigate brain activation during automatic processing of emotional facial expressions and prosody in social phobia before and after CBT. Using parallel event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) and by means of the variation of emotional expression (angry, happy, neutral), emotional intensity (low, high), attentional load (low, high) and sensory modality (faces, voices), we intend to answer the following questions. (1) Is there evidence for rapid threat-specific brain responses to faces and voices in social phobia? (2) Which role does attentional load play for emotion-specific activation patterns? (3) Are there overlapping/similar brain mechanisms for processing emotional information from voices and faces in social phobia? (4) How are phobia-related automatic brain responses modified by successful CBT? (5) Do brain responses during automatic processing of social stimuli predict treatment responses?