Faculty of Human Sciences, Waseda University, Japan.
School of Human Care Studies, Nagoya University of Arts and Sciences, Japan.
Percept Mot Skills. 2019 Dec;126(6):1101-1116. doi: 10.1177/0031512519867798. Epub 2019 Aug 6.
Social anxiety disorder is characterized by a marked fear and avoidance of social situations or a fear of being evaluated by others. Although training for top-down attentional control has been an effective treatment for social anxiety disorder, few studies have demonstrated that individuals with social anxiety have top-down attentional dysfunction. This study used dichotic listening (DL) tasks to investigate the relationship between social anxiety and top-down attentional control over relevant brain activities. We also investigated relationships between both social situation-dependent self-focused attention and external attention bias and situation-independent attentional control. Thirty-six healthy participants underwent near-infrared spectroscopy scanning while performing top-down selective and divided attention DL tasks. Then, they undertook a speech task and completed a questionnaire to assess the degrees of their self-focused attention and external attention bias. The results showed that the degree of social fear and self-focused attention during the speech task were negatively correlated with scores on the selective attention task and with the activity of the left pars opercularis during the selective DL task, which were related to each other. These results suggest that a relationship exists between social fear, self-focused attention in a social situation, and top-down selective attentional dysfunction as assessed both behaviorally and by brain activity changes.
社交焦虑障碍的特征是对社交场合明显的恐惧和回避，或害怕被他人评价。尽管自上而下的注意力控制训练已被证明是治疗社交焦虑障碍的有效方法，但很少有研究表明社交焦虑患者存在自上而下的注意力功能障碍。本研究使用双耳分听（DL）任务来研究社交焦虑与相关脑活动的自上而下注意力控制之间的关系。我们还研究了社交情境相关的自我关注和外部注意偏向与情境独立注意力控制之间的关系。36 名健康参与者在进行自上而下的选择性和分散注意力的 DL 任务时接受了近红外光谱扫描。然后，他们进行了言语任务，并完成了一份问卷，以评估他们的自我关注和外部注意偏向的程度。结果表明，言语任务中的社交恐惧程度和自我关注程度与选择性注意任务的得分以及选择性 DL 任务中左侧脑岛盖部的活动呈负相关，两者之间存在关联。这些结果表明，社交恐惧、社交情境中的自我关注与自上而下的选择性注意力功能障碍之间存在关系，这种关系可以通过行为和大脑活动变化来评估。
