Yin Fei, Si Feng, Huo Shuhui, Wang Zhengjun, Yang Haibo, Zhao Xiwu, Cao Jianqin
Department of Nursing, Harbin Medical University, Daqing, People's Republic of China.
Key Laboratory of Human Factors and Ergonomics for State Market Regulation, China National Institute of Standardization, Beijing, People's Republic of China.
Cogn Emot. 2025 May;39(3):603-613. doi: 10.1080/02699931.2024.2381660. Epub 2024 Jul 24.
Even though some recent research revealed individuals with HSA typically display enhanced processing in the early stages of emotional information processing due to hypervigilance and vulnerability to negative stimuli, it is still unclear whether social anxiety affects the time course underlying processing bias for emotional stimuli. Therefore, the present study aimed to explore the early stage of processing social threat stimuli in high social anxiety (HSA) individuals by recording RTs and EEG data in the emotional Stroop task. Behavioral data showed that the HSA group responded to the threat words faster than neutral words (i.e. negative bias), but no emotional effects in the low social anxiety (LSA) group. Although the P1 component did not show any early effects, ERP data exhibited an enhanced N170 for HSA than for LSA groups. Threat words elicited larger N170 than neutral words in the LSA group only; this emotion effect was not evident in the HSA group. These findings indicated that social anxiety modulates early processing for social threat words. This study revealed the neural mechanisms underlying early emotional processing in individuals with social anxiety, providing insights for the evaluation and intervention of social anxiety.
尽管最近的一些研究表明，由于过度警觉和对负面刺激的易感性，社交焦虑症患者通常在情绪信息处理的早期阶段表现出增强的处理能力，但社交焦虑是否会影响情绪刺激处理偏差的时间进程仍不清楚。因此，本研究旨在通过记录情绪Stroop任务中的反应时间（RTs）和脑电图（EEG）数据，探索高社交焦虑（HSA）个体处理社会威胁刺激的早期阶段。行为数据表明，HSA组对威胁词的反应比对中性词更快（即负性偏差），但低社交焦虑（LSA）组没有情绪效应。虽然P1成分没有显示出任何早期效应，但ERP数据显示，HSA组的N170比LSA组增强。仅在LSA组中，威胁词比中性词引发更大的N170；这种情绪效应在HSA组中不明显。这些发现表明，社交焦虑调节对社会威胁词的早期处理。本研究揭示了社交焦虑个体早期情绪处理的神经机制，为社交焦虑的评估和干预提供了见解。
