ArticleBritish journal of psychology (London, England : 1953)2020
Social anxiety modulates visual exploration in real life - but not in the laboratory.
Article in British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953), 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 49 citations in OpenAlex.
- Guiding gaze via gaze: Effect anticipation during intentional saccadic gaze leading.Psychological research · 2026Article
- Social stress task with parental support or self-instruction decreases negative cognitions in children with social anxiety disorder.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Study protocol for the EYEdentify project: An examination of gaze behaviour in autistic adults using a virtual reality-based paradigm.PloS one · 2025Article
- Individual differences in face salience and rapid face saccades.Journal of vision · 2024Article
- The robustness of individual differences in gaze preferences toward faces and eyes across face-to-face experimental designs and its relation to social anxiety.Journal of vision · 2023Article
- VR for Studying the Neuroscience of Emotional Responses.Current topics in behavioral neurosciences · 2023Article
- Article
- Idiosyncratic viewing patterns of social scenes reflect individual preferences.Journal of vision · 2022Article
- Reality in a sphere: A direct comparison of social attention in the laboratory and the real world.Behavior research methods · 2022Article
- From eye to arrow: Attention capture by direct gaze requires more than just the eyes.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2022Article
- Social anxiety is associated with heart rate but not gaze behavior in a real social interaction.Journal of behavior therapy and experimental psychiatry · 2021Article
- A Revised Framework for the Investigation of Expectation Update Versus Maintenance in the Context of Expectation Violations: The ViolEx 2.0 Model.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Avoidance of social threat: Evidence from eye movements during a public speaking challenge using 360°- video.Behaviour research and therapy · 2020Article
- Looking behavior and potential human interactions during locomotion.Journal of vision · 2020Article
- Violence reduces attention to faces and draws attention to points of contact.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
In clinical reports, individuals high on social anxiety are often described to avoid gaze at other people, whereas several experimental studies employing images of persons yielded conflicting results. Here, we show that gaze avoidance crucially depends on the possibility of social interactions. We examined gaze behaviour in individuals with varying degrees of social anxiety in real-life and in a second group of participants using a closely matched laboratory condition. In the real-life situation, individuals with a higher degree of social anxiety had a reduced bias to look at near persons compared to individuals with a lower degree of social anxiety, while gaze behaviour in the laboratory group was not modulated by social anxiety. This effect was specific to social attention since there was no corresponding effect regarding fixations on objects. The presence of anxiety effects in real-life but not in the laboratory condition, where participants do not expect to be evaluated by gazed-at conspecifics, points to critical deficits of current laboratory research paradigms in eliciting authentic social attentional mechanisms, possibly leading to spurious results.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
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.