Wabnitz Pascal, Martens Ulla, Neuner Frank
a Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy , University of Bielefeld , Bielefeld , Germany.
b Department of Cognitive Psychology , University of Osnabrück , Osnabrück , Germany.
Cogn Emot. 2016;30(3):516-38. doi: 10.1080/02699931.2015.1019837. Epub 2015 Mar 26.
Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is associated with heightened sensitivity to threat cues, typically represented by emotional facial expressions. To examine if this bias can be transferred to a general hypersensitivity or whether it is specific to disorder relevant cues, we investigated electrophysiological correlates of emotional word processing (alpha activity and event-related potentials) in 20 healthy participants and 20 participants with SAD. The experimental task was a silent reading of neutral, positive, physically threatening and socially threatening words (the latter were abusive swear words) while responding to a randomly presented dot. Subsequently, all participants were asked to recall as many words as possible during an unexpected recall test. Participants with SAD showed blunted sensory processing followed by a rapid processing of emotional words during early stages (early posterior negativity - EPN). At later stages, all participants showed enhanced processing of negative (physically and socially threatening) compared to neutral and positive words (N400). Moreover, at later processing stages alpha activity was increased specifically for negative words in participants with SAD but not in healthy controls. Recall of emotional words for all subjects was best for socially threatening words, followed by negative and positive words irrespective of social anxiety. The present findings indicate that SAD is associated with abnormalities in emotional word processing characterised by early hypervigilance to emotional cues followed by cognitive avoidance at later processing stages. Most importantly, the specificity of these attentional biases seems to change as a function of time with a general emotional bias at early and a more specific bias at later processing stages.
社交焦虑障碍（SAD）与对威胁线索的高度敏感性相关，这种线索通常由情绪化的面部表情呈现。为了研究这种偏向是否能转化为一般的超敏反应，或者它是否特定于与障碍相关的线索，我们调查了20名健康参与者和20名患有社交焦虑障碍的参与者在对情感词汇进行加工时的电生理相关性（阿尔法活动和事件相关电位）。实验任务是默读中性、积极、身体威胁性和社会威胁性词汇（后者为辱骂性脏话），同时对随机呈现的点做出反应。随后，在一次意外的回忆测试中，要求所有参与者尽可能多地回忆单词。患有社交焦虑障碍的参与者在早期阶段（早期后负波 - EPN）表现出感觉加工迟钝，随后对情感词汇进行快速加工。在后期阶段，与中性和积极词汇相比，所有参与者对消极（身体和社会威胁性）词汇的加工增强（N400）。此外，在后期加工阶段，患有社交焦虑障碍的参与者中，阿尔法活动仅针对消极词汇增加，而健康对照组则没有。所有受试者对情感词汇的回忆，对社会威胁性词汇最好，其次是消极和积极词汇，与社交焦虑无关。目前的研究结果表明，社交焦虑障碍与情感词汇加工异常有关，其特征是早期对情感线索过度警觉，随后在后期加工阶段出现认知回避。最重要的是，这些注意偏向的特异性似乎随时间而变化，在早期阶段存在一般的情感偏向，而在后期加工阶段存在更具体的偏向。
