Department of Psychiatry, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.
Department of Psychology, Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, WV, USA.
Int J Psychophysiol. 2020 Jul;153:159-165. doi: 10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2020.04.017. Epub 2020 May 7.
Attention bias to affective stimuli, particularly threatening stimuli, has been well documented, with attention bias to affective faces often reported in populations with social anxiety (SA). However, inconsistencies exist in the literature regarding the direction of the bias, with some studies reporting a bias to attend toward social threat, and others reporting a bias to avoid social threat. This variability in the attention bias literature could be related to fluctuations in how attentional resources are allocated toward social stimuli over time. This study aimed to isolate early processing of affective faces using a backward masking paradigm in participants with high and low levels of subclinical SA. We used prepulse inhibition (PPI) of startle to index the amount of early attention allocated to masked affective faces. There was greater PPI to masked angry faces compared to neutral faces across all participants, suggesting that more attention was allocated to threatening faces. This effect was similar across face genders and participant SA levels. There was also a trend for more attention to be allocated to masked affective faces (angry and happy) compared to neutral faces across all participants. These findings demonstrate that attention bias to subliminal affect, and threat specifically, may not be modulated by subclinical levels of SA at very early stages of attention processing.
注意对情感刺激（尤其是威胁性刺激）的偏向已得到充分证实，社交焦虑症（SA）患者群体中常报告对情感面孔的注意偏向。然而，文献中关于注意偏向的方向存在不一致，一些研究报告称存在对社交威胁的注意偏向，而另一些研究则报告存在对社交威胁的回避偏向。注意偏向文献中的这种可变性可能与随着时间的推移，注意力资源如何分配到社交刺激上的波动有关。本研究旨在使用高、低亚临床 SA 参与者的后向掩蔽范式来分离情感面孔的早期处理。我们使用 startle 的 prepulse inhibition (PPI) 来指示分配给掩蔽情感面孔的早期注意力量。与中性面孔相比，所有参与者对掩蔽的愤怒面孔的 PPI 更大，这表明对威胁面孔分配了更多的注意力。这种影响在面孔性别和参与者的 SA 水平上相似。在所有参与者中，与中性面孔相比，也有更多的注意力分配给掩蔽的情感面孔（愤怒和快乐）。这些发现表明，在注意处理的非常早期阶段，亚临床水平的 SA 可能不会调节对潜意识情感的注意偏向，特别是对威胁的注意偏向。
