ArticleBiological psychiatry2018
Face Perception in Social Anxiety: Visuocortical Dynamics Reveal Propensities for Hypervigilance or Avoidance.
Article in Biological psychiatry, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers.
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Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed.
- Visual attention toward emotional stimuli: Anxiety symptoms correspond to distinct gaze patterns.PloS one · 2021Trial
- Social anxiety is associated with greater autonomic and visuocortical generalization of conditioned aversive responses to faces.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Using novel neural measures to explore the development of infant attention bias to threat.Developmental psychology · 2025Article
- Role of social competence in emotion processing among emerging adults with anxiety.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Functional correlates of atypical visuoperceptual organization in a multisite clinical high-risk sample.Journal of psychopathology and clinical science · 2025Article
- Article
- Neurophysiological and Autonomic Dynamics of Threat Processing during Sustained Social Fear Generalization.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2025Article
- The modulatory effect of evaluative valence on fear generalization in social anxiety: an SSVEP study.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Article
- Neurophysiological and Autonomic Dynamics of Threat Processing During Sustained Social Fear Generalization.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Attentional heterogeneity in social anxiety disorder: Evidence from Hidden Markov Models.Behaviour research and therapy · 2024Article
- Research hotspots and trends of neuroimaging in social anxiety: a CiteSpace bibliometric analysis based on Web of Science and Scopus database.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2024Review
- Baby Brains at Work: How Task-Based Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Can Illuminate the Early Emergence of Psychiatric Risk.Biological psychiatry · 2023Review
- Attentional capture by angry faces in girls who self-injure: Evidence from steady state visual evoked potentials.Suicide & life-threatening behavior · 2022Article
- Increased amygdala and decreased frontolimbic r esting- s tate functional connectivity in children with aggressive behavior.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2022Article
- Abnormal Visual Evoked Responses to Emotional Cues Correspond to Diagnosis and Disease Severity in Fibromyalgia.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2022Article
- Decoding Neural Representations of Affective Scenes in Retinotopic Visual Cortex.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2021Article
- Effects of affective content and motivational context on neural gain functions during naturalistic scene perception.The European journal of neuroscience · 2021Article
- Psychedelic Therapy's Transdiagnostic Effects: A Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) Perspective.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2021Review
- Article
- Targeting separate specific learning parameters underlying cognitive behavioral therapy can improve perceptual judgments of anger.Journal of behavior therapy and experimental psychiatry · 2019Article
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6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundTheories of aberrant attentional processing in social anxiety, and anxiety disorders more broadly, have postulated an initial hypervigilance or facilitation to clinically relevant threats and consequent defensive avoidance. However, existing objective measurements utilized to explore this phenomenon lack the resolution to elucidate attentional dynamics, particularly covert influences.
methodsWe utilized a continuous measure of visuocortical engagement, the steady-state visual evoked potential in response to naturalistic angry, fearful, happy, and neutral facial expressions. Participants were treatment-seeking patients with principal diagnoses of social anxiety circumscribed to performance situations (n = 21) or generalized across interaction contexts (n = 42), treatment-seeking patients with panic disorder with agoraphobia (n = 25), and 17 healthy participants.
resultsAt the principal disorder level, only circumscribed social anxiety patients showed sustained visuocortical facilitation to aversive facial expressions. Control participants as well as patients with panic disorder with agoraphobia and generalized social anxiety showed no bias. More finely stratifying the sample according to clinical judgment of social anxiety severity and interference revealed a linear increase in visuocortical bias to aversive expressions for all but the most severely impaired patients. This group showed an opposing sustained attentional disengagement.
conclusionsRather than shifts between covert vigilance and avoidance of aversive facial expressions, social anxiety appears to confer a sustained bias for one or the other. While vigilant attention reliably increases with social anxiety severity for the majority of patients, the most impaired patients show an opposing avoidance. These distinct patterns of attentional allocation could provide a powerful means of personalizing neuroscience-based interventions to modify attention bias and related impairment.
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