Attentional control deficits in social anxiety: Investigating inhibition and shifting functions using a mixed antisaccade paradigm.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

Attentional control has recently been assumed to play a critical role in the generation and maintenance of threat-related attentional bias and social anxiety. The present study aimed to investigate whether socially anxious (SA) individuals show impairments in attentional control functions, particularly in inhibition and shifting.

METHODS

Forty-two SA and 41 non-anxious (NA) participants completed a mixed antisaccade task, a variant of the antisaccade task that is used to investigate inhibition as well as shifting functions.

RESULTS

The results showed that, overall, SA participants had longer antisaccade latencies than NA participants, but the two groups did not differ in their antisaccade error rates. Moreover, in the single-task block, SA participants had longer latencies than NA participants for antisaccade but not prosaccade trials. In the mixed-task block, the SA participants had longer latencies than the NA participants for both task types. The two groups did not differ in their latency switch costs in the mixed-task blocks.

LIMITATIONS

First, this study was conducted using a non-clinical sample of undergraduate students. Second, the antisaccade task measures primarily oculomotor inhibition. Third, this study did not include the measure of state anxiety to rule out the effects of state anxiety on the present findings.

CONCLUSIONS

This study suggests that SA individuals demonstrate diminished efficiency of inhibition function but show no significant impairment of shifting function. However, in the mixed-task condition, SA individuals may exhibit an overall reduction in processing efficiency due to the higher task difficulty.