Rossignol Mandy, Fisch Sophie-Alexandra, Maurage Pierre, Joassin Frédéric, Philippot Pierre
Institut de Recherche en Psychologie, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium.
PLoS One. 2013 Sep 9;8(9):e75234. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0075234. eCollection 2013.
Social anxiety is characterized by fear of evaluative interpersonal situations. Many studies have investigated the perception of emotional faces in socially anxious individuals and have reported biases in the processing of threatening faces. However, faces are not the only stimuli carrying an interpersonal evaluative load. The present study investigated the processing of emotional body postures in social anxiety. Participants with high and low social anxiety completed an attention-shifting paradigm using neutral, angry and happy faces and postures as cues. We investigated early visual processes through the P100 component, attentional fixation on the P2, structural encoding mirrored by the N170, and attentional orientation towards stimuli to detect with the P100 locked on target occurrence. Results showed a global reduction of P100 and P200 responses to faces and postures in socially anxious participants as compared to non-anxious participants, with a direct correlation between self-reported social anxiety levels and P100 and P200 amplitudes. Structural encoding of cues and target processing were not modulated by social anxiety, but socially anxious participants were slower to detect the targets. These results suggest a reduced processing of social postural and facial cues in social anxiety.
社交焦虑的特征是害怕处于有评价性的人际情境中。许多研究调查了社交焦虑个体对情绪面孔的感知，并报告了在处理威胁性面孔时存在偏差。然而，面孔并不是唯一承载人际评价负荷的刺激物。本研究调查了社交焦虑中情绪身体姿势的处理过程。高社交焦虑和低社交焦虑的参与者使用中性、愤怒和高兴的面孔及姿势作为线索完成了一个注意力转移范式。我们通过P100成分研究早期视觉过程，通过P2研究注意力固定，通过N170反映的结构编码，以及通过锁定目标出现时的P100来研究对刺激的注意力定向。结果显示，与非焦虑参与者相比，社交焦虑参与者对面孔和姿势的P100和P200反应总体降低，自我报告的社交焦虑水平与P100和P200振幅之间存在直接相关性。线索的结构编码和目标处理不受社交焦虑的调节，但社交焦虑参与者检测目标的速度较慢。这些结果表明社交焦虑中对社交姿势和面部线索的处理减少。
