ArticleJournal of behavior therapy and experimental psychiatry2021
Social anxiety is associated with heart rate but not gaze behavior in a real social interaction.
Article in Journal of behavior therapy and experimental psychiatry, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 53 citations in OpenAlex.
- Physical Activity as a Treatment for Social Anxiety in Clinical and Non-clinical Populations: A Systematic Review and Three Meta-Analyses for Different Study Designs.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2021Pooled it
- Trial
- Automated Inference of Social Anxiety From Behavior in Social Virtual Reality: Cross-Sectional Observational Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2026Observational
- Laughter in the making: social bonding and coordination in dance practices.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Altered interactive dynamics of gaze behavior during face-to-face interaction in autistic individuals: a dual eye-tracking study.Molecular autism · 2025Article
- Expectations guide predictive eye movements and information sampling during face recognition.iScience · 2024Article
- Gaze behavior in response to affect during natural social interactions.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Effects of emotional content on social inhibition of gaze in live social and non-social situations.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Enhancing precision in human neuroscience.eLife · 2023Review
- 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
- Virtual Reality Training of Social Skills in Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder: An Examination of Acceptability, Usability, User Experience, Social Skills, and Executive Functions.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- No evidence that gaze anxiety predicts gaze avoidance behavior during face-to-face social interaction.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- 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
- Prediction of Specific Anxiety Symptoms and Virtual Reality Sickness Using In Situ Autonomic Physiological Signals During Virtual Reality Treatment in Patients With Social Anxiety Disorder: Mixed Methods Study.JMIR serious games · 2022Article
- Selective visual attention during public speaking in an immersive context.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2022Article
- Gaze behavior is associated with the cortisol response to acute psychosocial stress in the virtual TSST.Journal of neural transmission (Vienna, Austria : 1996) · 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
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND
objectivesMuch of our current understanding of social anxiety rests on the use of highly restricted laboratory experiments. Latest technological developments now allow the investigation of eye movements and physiological measures during real social interactions. Considering the wealth of conflicting findings on gaze behavior in social anxiety, the current study aimed at elucidating the modulation of gaze patterns in a naturalistic setting.
methodsWe introduced 71 participants with differing social anxiety symptoms to a waiting room situation while recording heart rate, electrodermal activity and eye movements using mobile technology.
resultsWe observed fewer fixations on the head of the confederate in the initial waiting phase of the experiment. These head fixations increased when the confederate was involved in a phone call and subsequently initiated an actual conversation. Contrary to gaze-avoidance models of social anxiety, we did not observe any correlations between social anxiety and visual attention but an elevated heart rate in participants with high social anxiety. LIMITATIONS: Although social anxiety varied considerably in the current sample and reached clinically relevant levels in one third of participants, formal clinical diagnoses were not available.
conclusionsThe current findings suggest that gaze avoidance might only occur in specific situations or very high levels of social anxiety. Fear of eye contact could at times represent a subjectively experienced rather than an objectively measurable feature of the disorder. The observation of elevated heart rate throughout the entire experiment indicates that physiological hyperactivity might constitute a cardinal feature of social anxiety.
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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.