Your Face Scares Me: Effects of Perceptual Load and Social Anxiety on Processing of Threatening and Neutral Faces

Overview

Journal PLoS One

Specialties General Medicine
Science

Date 2021 Mar 24

PMID 33760893

Authors

Marios Theodorou

Nikos Konstantinou

Georgia Panayiotou

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Social Anxiety Disorder is among the most widely studied psychiatric conditions. However, the role of attentional and emotional processes in the maintenance of the condition is still not well-established. This study addressed the impact of individual differences in Social Anxiety, by examining the effects of perceptual load and stimulus valence when processing faces vs objects, here used as distractors, within a letter-search task. In addition to RT and accuracy on the letter search task, heart rate, and skin conductance during the task and participants' self-report emotional evaluation were assessed to help interpret performance effects. Results suggest that distractor stimuli that are either threatening or faces impair performance of high SA participants. Results demonstrate a hypervigilance for threatening faces in SA but indicate that this happens primarily when cognitive resources are available, that is, under low perceptual load.

References

Ohman A . Face the beast and fear the face: animal and social fears as prototypes for evolutionary analyses of emotion. Psychophysiology. 1986; 23(2):123-45. DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-8986.1986.tb00608.x. View

Lavie N . Perceptual load as a necessary condition for selective attention. J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 1995; 21(3):451-68. DOI: 10.1037//0096-1523.21.3.451. View

Pintzinger N, Pfabigan D, Tran U, Kryspin-Exner I, Lamm C . Attentional biases in healthy adults: Exploring the impact of temperament and gender. J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry. 2016; 52:29-37. DOI: 10.1016/j.jbtep.2016.02.003. View

Van Dillen L, Heslenfeld D, Koole S . Tuning down the emotional brain: an fMRI study of the effects of cognitive load on the processing of affective images. Neuroimage. 2009; 45(4):1212-9. DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2009.01.016. View

Lavie N, Ro T, Russell C . The role of perceptual load in processing distractor faces. Psychol Sci. 2003; 14(5):510-5. DOI: 10.1111/1467-9280.03453. View

Lang P . Presidential address, 1978. A bio-informational theory of emotional imagery. Psychophysiology. 1979; 16(6):495-512. DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-8986.1979.tb01511.x. View

Kolassa I, Miltner W . Psychophysiological correlates of face processing in social phobia. Brain Res. 2006; 1118(1):130-41. DOI: 10.1016/j.brainres.2006.08.019. View

Mogg K, Bradley B . Selective orienting of attention to masked threat faces in social anxiety. Behav Res Ther. 2002; 40(12):1403-14. DOI: 10.1016/s0005-7967(02)00017-7. View

LeDoux J . Emotion circuits in the brain. Annu Rev Neurosci. 2000; 23:155-84. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.neuro.23.1.155. View

10.

Chen Y, Ehlers A, Clark D, Mansell W . Patients with generalized social phobia direct their attention away from faces. Behav Res Ther. 2002; 40(6):677-87. DOI: 10.1016/s0005-7967(01)00086-9. View

11.

Wieser M, Pauli P, Alpers G, Muhlberger A . Is eye to eye contact really threatening and avoided in social anxiety?--An eye-tracking and psychophysiology study. J Anxiety Disord. 2008; 23(1):93-103. DOI: 10.1016/j.janxdis.2008.04.004. View

12.

Konkle T, Brady T, Alvarez G, Oliva A . Conceptual distinctiveness supports detailed visual long-term memory for real-world objects. J Exp Psychol Gen. 2010; 139(3):558-78. PMC: 3398125. DOI: 10.1037/a0019165. View

13.

Carmel D, Fairnie J, Lavie N . Weight and see: loading working memory improves incidental identification of irrelevant faces. Front Psychol. 2012; 3:286. PMC: 3419462. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00286. View

14.

Rapee R, Heimberg R . A cognitive-behavioral model of anxiety in social phobia. Behav Res Ther. 1997; 35(8):741-56. DOI: 10.1016/s0005-7967(97)00022-3. View

15.

Juth P, Lundqvist D, Karlsson A, Ohman A . Looking for foes and friends: perceptual and emotional factors when finding a face in the crowd. Emotion. 2005; 5(4):379-95. DOI: 10.1037/1528-3542.5.4.379. View

16.

Wangelin B, Bradley M, Kastner A, Lang P . Affective engagement for facial expressions and emotional scenes: the influence of social anxiety. Biol Psychol. 2012; 91(1):103-10. PMC: 3407306. DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2012.05.002. View

17.

Silvert L, Lepsien J, Fragopanagos N, Goolsby B, Kiss M, Taylor J . Influence of attentional demands on the processing of emotional facial expressions in the amygdala. Neuroimage. 2007; 38(2):357-66. DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2007.07.023. View

18.

Vaskevich A, Luria R . Adding statistical regularity results in a global slowdown in visual search. Cognition. 2018; 174:19-27. DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.01.010. View

19.

Yates A, Ashwin C, Fox E . Does emotion processing require attention? The effects of fear conditioning and perceptual load. Emotion. 2010; 10(6):822-30. PMC: 3491873. DOI: 10.1037/a0020325. View

20.

Cooney R, Atlas L, Joormann J, Eugene F, Gotlib I . Amygdala activation in the processing of neutral faces in social anxiety disorder: is neutral really neutral?. Psychiatry Res. 2006; 148(1):55-9. DOI: 10.1016/j.pscychresns.2006.05.003. View