ArticlePloS one2014
They are laughing at me: cerebral mediation of cognitive biases in social anxiety.
Article in PloS one, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 30 citations in OpenAlex.
- Detecting social cues conveyed by laughter and associations with callous-unemotional traits in early childhood.Journal of experimental child psychology · 2026Article
- Neural processing of laughter in depression.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Pre-COVID brain network topology prospectively predicts social anxiety alterations during the COVID-19 pandemic.Neurobiology of stress · 2023Article
- Neurobiological correlates and attenuated positive social intention attribution during laughter perception associated with degree of autistic traits.Journal of neural transmission (Vienna, Austria : 1996) · 2023Article
- Intrinsic functional connectivity in families genetically enriched for social anxiety disorder - an endophenotype study.EBioMedicine · 2021Article
- Are you laughing at me? Neural correlates of social intent attribution to auditory and visual laughter.Human brain mapping · 2020Article
- The Neural Correlates of Face-Voice-Integration in Social Anxiety Disorder.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2020Article
- Feasibility of NIRS-based neurofeedback training in social anxiety disorder: behavioral and neural correlates.Journal of neural transmission (Vienna, Austria : 1996) · 2019Article
- Neural circuits in anxiety and stress disorders: a focused review.Therapeutics and clinical risk management · 2015Review
- Neural correlates of attentional control in social anxiety disorder: the impact of early-life adversity and DNA methylation.Journal of psychiatry & neuroscience : JPNArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The fear of embarrassment and humiliation is the central element of social anxiety. This frequent condition is associated with cognitive biases indicating increased sensitivity to signals of social threat, which are assumed to play a causal role in the maintenance of social anxiety. Here, we employed laughter, a potent medium for the expression of acceptance and rejection, as an experimental stimulus in participants selected for varying degrees of social anxiety to identify cerebral mediators of cognitive biases in social anxiety using functional magnetic resonance imaging in combination with mediation analysis. We directly demonstrated that cerebral activation patterns within the dorsal attention network including the left dorsolateral and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex mediate the influence of social anxiety on laughter perception. This mediation proved to be specific for social anxiety after correction for measures of general state and trait anxiety and occurred most prominently under bimodal audiovisual laughter presentation when compared with monomodal auditory or visual laughter cues. Considering the possibility to modulate cognitive biases and cerebral activity by neuropsychological trainings, non-invasive electrophysiological stimulation and psychotherapy, this study represents a starting point for a whole line of translational research projects and identifies promising targets for electrophysiological interventions aiming to alleviate cognitive biases and symptom severity in social anxiety.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.