Department of Health Sciences, Universidad de Burgos, 09001 Burgos, Spain.
Department of Cognitive Psychology, and Instituto Universitario de Neurociencia (IUNE), Universidad de La Laguna, 38205 Tenerife, Spain.
Psychiatry Res. 2018 Apr;262:55-62. doi: 10.1016/j.psychres.2018.01.031. Epub 2018 Feb 20.
Cognitive models posit that social anxiety is associated with biased attention to and interpretation of ambiguous social cues as threatening. We investigated attentional bias (selective early fixation on the eye region) to account for the tendency to distrust ambiguous smiling faces with non-happy eyes (interpretative bias). Eye movements and fixations were recorded while observers viewed video-clips displaying dynamic facial expressions. Low (LSA) and high (HSA) socially anxious undergraduates with clinical levels of anxiety judged expressers' trustworthiness. Social anxiety was unrelated to trustworthiness ratings for faces with congruent happy eyes and a smile, and for neutral expressions. However, social anxiety was associated with reduced trustworthiness rating for faces with an ambiguous smile, when the eyes slightly changed to neutrality, surprise, fear, or anger. Importantly, HSA observers looked earlier and longer at the eye region, whereas LSA observers preferentially looked at the smiling mouth region. This attentional bias in social anxiety generalizes to all the facial expressions, while the interpretative bias is specific for ambiguous faces. Such biases are adaptive, as they facilitate an early detection of expressive incongruences and the recognition of untrustworthy expressers (e.g., with fake smiles), with no false alarms when judging truly happy or neutral faces.
认知模型假设，社交焦虑与对模糊社交线索的偏向性注意和解释有关，这些线索被视为威胁。我们研究了注意力偏向（选择性地早期关注眼睛区域），以解释对带有不开心眼睛的模糊微笑面孔不信任的倾向（解释性偏见）。在观察者观看显示动态面部表情的视频剪辑时，记录了眼动和注视。具有临床焦虑水平的低社交焦虑（LSA）和高社交焦虑（HSA）大学生判断表达者的可信度。对于眼睛和笑容一致的微笑面孔以及中性表情，社交焦虑与可信度评分无关。然而，当眼睛略微向中性、惊讶、恐惧或愤怒转变时，对于带有模糊微笑的面孔，社交焦虑与降低的可信度评分相关。重要的是，HSA 观察者更早和更长时间地注视眼睛区域，而 LSA 观察者则优先注视微笑的嘴部区域。这种社交焦虑的注意力偏向适用于所有面部表情，而解释性偏见则是模糊面孔所特有的。这些偏见是适应性的，因为它们有助于早期检测表达不一致，并识别不可信的表达者（例如，带有虚假的微笑），而在判断真正开心或中性的面孔时不会出现误报。
