School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052, Australia.
Psychiatry Res. 2013 Nov 30;210(1):193-8. doi: 10.1016/j.psychres.2013.05.020. Epub 2013 Jun 14.
The fear of being scrutinised is a core feature of social anxiety disorder and socially anxious individuals overestimate being 'looked at'. A recent development in the vision sciences is a reliable psychophysical index of the range of eye gaze angles judged as being directed at oneself (Cone of Direct Gaze: CoDG). We tested the CoDG as a measure of "being looked at" in social anxiety. Participants were stratified into high/low social anxiety groups and asked to judge whether they were being 'looked at' by computerised male faces varying in eye gaze deviation and facial emotion. High socially anxious males had a wider CoDG than low socially anxious males; high and low socially anxious females did not differ. Fearful faces elicited narrower cones than neutral or angry faces; however, the effect size was small and not evident for the high socially anxious males. Measures of subjective reactions to the study, and to being looked at in general, indicated that the results may be in part due to males suffering more discomfort when being looked at. The results show that measures derived from psychophysics, in this case, the CoDG, have potential as clinical and research tools for measuring anxiety about being scrutinised.
被审视的恐惧是社交焦虑障碍的核心特征，社交焦虑个体高估了自己被“注视”的程度。视觉科学的一个最新进展是一种可靠的心理物理指标，可以衡量被判断为注视自己的眼球注视角度范围（直接注视圆锥：CoDG）。我们将 CoDG 作为社交焦虑中“被注视”的测量指标进行了测试。参与者被分为高/低社交焦虑组，并被要求判断他们是否被电脑化的男性面孔注视，这些面孔的眼球注视偏差和面部表情各不相同。高社交焦虑男性的 CoDG 比低社交焦虑男性的 CoDG 更宽；高社交焦虑女性和低社交焦虑女性之间没有差异。恐惧面孔引起的圆锥比中性或愤怒面孔更窄；然而，这种效果大小较小，对于高社交焦虑男性来说并不明显。对研究以及一般被注视的主观反应的测量表明，结果可能部分归因于男性在被注视时感到更不舒服。研究结果表明，源自心理物理学的测量方法（在这种情况下为 CoDG）具有作为衡量被审视焦虑的临床和研究工具的潜力。
