Social Anxiety and Attention away from Emotional Faces

COG N ITION AN D EMOTION, 1999, 13 (6), 673±690

Social Anxiety and Attention away from Emotional Faces Warren M ansell, D avid M . Clark, Anke Ehlers, and Yi-Ping Chen University of Oxford, Warneford Hospital, UK

A substantial literature indicates that anxiety is often associated with selective attention to threat cues. Socially anxious individuals are excessively concerned about negative evaluation by others. One might therefore predict that high social anxiety would be associated with selective attention to negative facial expressions. On the other hand, some recent models have suggested that social anxiety may be associated with reduced processing of external social cues. A modi® ed dot-probe task was used to investigate face attention. H igh and low socially anxious individuals were presented with pairs of pictures, consisting of a face (positive, neutral, or negative) and a household object, under conditions of social-evaluative threat or no threat. The results indicated that, compared to low socially anxious individuals, high socially anxious individuals show an attentional bias away from emotional (positive and negative) faces but this effect is only observed under conditions of social-evaluative threat. Theoretical and clinical implications of the results are discussed.

INTRODUCTION Several cognitive models (Beck, Emery, & G reenberg, 1985; Eysenck, 1992, 1997; Williams, Watts, M acLeod, & M athews, 1988, 1997) have proposed that anxiety is associated with an attentional bias to threat cues. N umerous studies comparing attention to threatening and nonthreatening words have supported this hypothesis (for reviews see M athews, 1997; Williams et al., 1997). H owever, responses to words representing one’s concerns may not be identical to responses to real-life threat cues. For this reason, researchers have recently attempted to study attentional bias to stimuli that are more Requests for reprints should be sent to Professor D avid M . Clark, D epartment of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, Warneford H ospital, Oxford, OX3 7JX. This research was supported by the M edical Research Council of the United K ingdom and the Wellcome Trust. David M . Clark and Anke Ehlers are Wellcome Principal Research Fellows. q

1999 Psychology Press Ltd

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directly related to stimuli that are likely to be encountered in a feared situation. For example, Lavy and Van den H out (1993) found that patients with spider phobia show an attentional bias towards pictures of spiders and Ehlers and Breuer (1995) found that panic disorder patients, who generally fear bodily sensations, showed an attentional bias towards an unpleasant tactile cue. The present study focuses on social anxiety and represents a further attempt to investigate attention to real-life threat cues. Social anxiety is characterised by a marked concern about the impression one makes on others. Facial expressions are a potential source of information about the way others react to one in a social situation. For this reason, we chose to study attention to various types of facial expression. The general cognitive models of anxiety just cited would appear to imply that socially anxious individuals should show an attentional bias to threatening facial expressions in other people. On the other hand, a long established clinical observation (e.g. D arwin, 1872, p. 347) is that socially anxious individuals tend to avoid looking at other people when in a feared social situation. Several speci® c models of social anxiety emphasise the importance of self-focused attention, rather than externally focused attention (e.g. Clark & Wells, 1995; H artman, 1983; H ope, G ansler, & H eimberg, 1989). One could therefore also predict that socially anxious individuals might show less attention to facial expressions than individuals who are not socially anxious. To date, two studies have investigated the effects of social anxiety on attention for facial expressions. Bradley et al. (1997, experiment 1) used a modi® ed version of M acLeod, M athews, and Tata’s (1986) dot-probe task. Students scoring in the upper and lower tertiles of the F ear of N egative Evaluation Scale (F N E; Watson & F riend, 1969) were presented with neutra l-happy and neutral-angry face pairs. The pairs of pictures were presented for 500msec, followed by the dot probe. N o face classi® cation response was required and no attempt was made to evoke social anxiety during the task. There was no evidence of a social anxiety related attentional bias, but post-hoc correlational analysis indicated that, compared to nondysphoric participants, dysphoric participants showed less avoidance of angry fa cial expressions. In contrast to the absence of a social anxiety effect in Bradley et al. (1997), Yuen (1994) found a signi® cant relationship between social anxiety and attentional bias for faces using another modi® ed version of the dotprobe task. H igh F N E (upper quartile) and low F N E (lower quartile) students were presented with two faces, one above the other. On critical trials one face wa s negative and the other was neutral. Participants were asked to classify the top face as soon as it appeared. After 1000msec the fa ces disappeared and were replaced by the dot probe. Social anxiety was

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induced by informing participants that they would have to give a public presentation immediately after the task. U nder these conditions, high F N E participants responded more slowly to probes that were preceded by negative fa cial expressions than to probes that were preceded by neutral facial expressions, suggesting that they were directing their attention away fro m the negative faces. Low F N E participants did not show this effect. In the study reported here, we used a further modi® cation of the dotprobe task to provide a conceptual replication and extension of the study. F irst, we wished to determine whether concurrent social-evaluative threat is necessary to produce avoidance of negative faces. For this reason, half of the participants performed the task under social threat and half had no threat. Second, we wished to explore attention to positive, as well as negative, facial expressions. Competing predictions can be deduced fro m the literature. M ogg and M arden (1990); M artin, Williams, and Clark (1991); and M athews and K lug (1993) found a similar attentional bias for negative and positive words (emotionality effect) in studies using the modi® ed Stroop task. This suggests that high social anxiety might be associated with avoidance of both negative and positive faces. Alternatively, general cognitive models of anxiety usually assume that anxious individuals will respond in opposite directions to positive and negative stimuli suggesting that high social anxious individuals might show least avoidance of positive faces and most avoidance of negative faces with neutral fa ces occupying an intermediate position (valence effect). Third, we wanted to be able to detect any overall tendency to direct attention towards or away from faces (irrespective of valence). For this reason, on each trial participants were presented with both a picture of a face and a picture of a household object that could have been present in the room while interacting with the person represented by the face. Fourth, to get round the problem that the dot in the dot-probe task can be detected with peripheral vision, the dot was replaced by a faint, small letter E or F and subjects had to indicate which letter wa s present. F ifth, to check that the long presentation interval (1000msec) used in Yuen (1994) wa s not the main reason for observing an avoidance effect, the shorter presentation interval (500msec) employed by Bradley et al. (1997) was used. Sixth, recognition memory for faces and objects presented in the dot-probe task was assessed to determine whether any attentional biases affected subsequent retention. F inally, measures of trait anxiety and depression were taken in order to determine whether any differences that were observed between high and low social anxiety participants were due to individual differences in propensity to social anxiety or to a more general difference in negative affectivity.

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METHOD Participants Participants were students at the U niversity of Oxford and Oxford Brookes U niversity who scored < 8 (lower quartile) or > 17 (upper quartile) on the F N E. Participants who scored above 20 on the Beck D epression Inventory (BD I; Beck, Rush, Shaw & Emery, 1979) were excluded at the request of the local ethics committee. Within the high and low social anxiety groups, equal numbers of individuals were assigned to the social threat and no threat conditions. It wa s important to the design of the experiment that participants in the threat condition believed that they would have to give a speech. It was therefore decided to exclude fro m the analyses participants who subsequently indicated they had substantial doubts about the manipulation. This was operationalised as less than 80% belief that they would have to give the speech. Four low socially anxious subjects and ® ve high socially anxious subjects were excluded because their belief ratings met this criterion. The numbers in the four experimental groups were as follows: high social anxiety/threat (n = 15; 5 males, 10 females); high social anxiety/ no threat (n = 20; 7 males, 13 females), low social anxiety/threat (n = 16; 8 males, 8 females), low social anxiety/no threat (n = 20; 9 males, 11 females). All participants completed the following standardised questionnaires: F N E, Social Avoidance and D istress Scale (SAD ; Watson & F riend, 1969), Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory (SPA I; Turner, Beidel, D ancu, & Stanley, 1989), Personal Report of Con® dence as a Speaker (PRCS; Paul, 1966), State±Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI ; Spielberger et al., 1983), and the BD I. Scores on each questionnaire were subjected to a two-way, Social Anxiety (high±low) 3 Threat Induction (threat±no threat) AN OVA. As one would expect fro m the random allocation procedure, there were no signi® cant main effects or interactions involving the threat induction. Signi® cant group main effects (see Table 1) indicated that the high social anxiety group scored higher than the low social anxiety group on all measures of social anxiety (F N E, SAD, PRCS, SPAI), and on the STAI and the BD I. The two groups did not differ in age or sex.

Materials Instantaneous Mood. Participants’ mood at different points in the experiment was assessed by four visual analogue scales in which 0 represented `Ì do not feel at all X’ ’ and 100 represented `Ì feel extremely X’’ . For different scales, X was happy, angry, anxious, and depressed. `Àt this moment’ ’ was typed at the top of the sheet to indicate that instantaneous mood was to be rated.

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SOCIAL ANXIETY AND ATTENTION TABLE 1 Characteristics of Participants in each Social Anxiety Group Low Social Anxiety Variable F N E (recruitment) F N E (experimen t) SAD SPAI PRCS STAI±Trait STAI±State BD I Age

High Social Anxiety

M

(SD)

M

(SD)

F

5.17 4.36 3.11 24.07 7.64 31.75 28.28 4.19 22.72

(2.20) (2.70) (4.47) (18.84) (5.34) (6.86) (5.82) (3.57) (2.85)

22.23 21.74 10.03 72.08 18.20 48.49 40.89 9.54 22.20

(3.40) (5.04) (6.96) (22.61) (7.68) (8.22) (9.09) (5.31) (6.61)

619.69* 322.63* 24.31* 64.29* 42.89* 82.11* 46.10* 24.03* 0.81

Note: n = 36 and 35 for the low and high social anxiety groups, respect ively; SPAI, n = 28 and 24 for low and high social anxiety groups, respect ively: * P < .001.

Pictures. The slides of faces showing happy, neutra l, and negative facial expressions developed by M atsumoto and Ekman (1988; JACF EE and JACN euF ) were used. The models included equal numbers of male and female, Caucasian, and Japanese individuals. M ost models provided a positive, neutral, and negative facial expression. The negative facial expressions consisted of equal numbers of anger, disgust, fear, and sadness. The 96 pictures of faces were paired with photographs of household objects. These were 24 pictures each of clocks, sofa s, phones, and vacuum cleaners. All pictures were scanned and converted to colour image (PICT) computer ® les. Each picture was further edited to ® t an upright rectangle measuring 7.5 3 6.0cm with a resolution of 28 pixels per cm. The faceobject pairs were matched by eye for brightness, colour, and contrast. A Power M ackintosh 7100/80 computer connected to a Sony Trinitron M ultiscan 15sf monitor was used to display the pictures. The background for the ® xation cross and pictures displays was black. Modi® ed Dot-probe Task. Participants were seated with their eyes 80cm fro m the monitor and level with the centre of the screen. Before each of the 96 trials, participants focused on a white, 2 3 2cm, centra l ® xation cross for 1000msec. The pairs of pictures (face-object) were presented diagonally on the screen (top right and bottom left, or top left and bottom right) for 500msec (plus 40msec build-up time), with the inside edges of the two pictures separated by 2cm horizontally and 2cm vertically. Participants were told that the position of the two pictures informed them of the two possible positions of the probe that would immediately follow presentation of the pictures. The probe display

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consisted of a 12-point brown letter `È’ ’ or ``F ’ ’ in a location that corresponded to the centre of one of the pictures. Participants had to press one of two buttons on the keyboard, marked with the letters `È’ ’ and ``F ’’ , respectively, to indicate which letter was displayed. Aft er their response, the probe disappeared and the next trial started. Participants were instructed to respond to the probe as quickly and accurately as possible. They had eight trials to practise pressing the appropriate buttons, and eight full practice trials using face-object pairs that did not occur in the main experiment. Acro ss all trials the following variables were counterbalanced: face position (upper, lower), probe position (upper, lower), fa ce type (positive, neutra l, negative), sex of the face, probe identity (`È’ ’ or ``F ’ ’ ), and diagonal orientation (upper left and lower right, lower left and upper right). Each participant saw the picture pairs in a different random order.

Recognition Memory Task. A total of 48 fa ces were presented in a random order, one at a time, on the screen. Equal numbers of positive, neutra l, and negative faces were presented. H alf of these had been presented in the dot-probe task and half were new. Each individual depicted in the pictures was presented for recognition once only. The memory task was repeated for 48 pictures of objects, half of which the participants had not seen before and half of which had been displayed opposite the faces which the subjects had to remember from the fa ce attention task. The participants were asked to press one of two adjacent keys labelled: ``Y’’ if they recognised the picture and ``N ’’ if they did not. They were instructed to respond as soon as they had made their decision.

Procedure Participants were tested individually. On arrival they completed the F N E, SAD, BD I, and STAI and were taught to use the instantaneous mood scales and rated their mood. H alf the participants in each social anxiety group were then given the social threat induction: The next part of this experiment is an assessment of your social skills and public speaking ability. In a while I am going to ask you to make a speech on a controversial topic. I will stay here to watch you give the speech and rate you on several different measures of the effectiveness of your presentation. This video camera is going to record you so that later some expert psychologists can make ratings of your ability as well. N ow, I won’t be giving you the topic of the speech until thirty seconds before I start the camera and you begin the speech.


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Participants who had received the social threat induction then rerated their mood. N ext, the lights were dimmed and all participants completed the dot-probe task, followed by the recognition memory task. After these tasks, participants in the threat condition were asked to rate, on a 0±100% scale, the extent to which they had believed the experimenter when told they would have to give a speech. F inally, the PRCS and SPAI were completed and participants were debriefed.

Data Analysis The data analysis for the dot-probe task wa s based on reaction times for correct responses. Reaction times for errors were removed from the data. For each participant, outliers were removed by excluding detection latencies that fell outside two standard deviations. For each type of facial expression (positive, neutral, negative), a bias score following M acLeod and M athews (1988) wa s calculated: Bias Score = 0.5 3 (F LPU + F U PL 2 F U PU 2 F LPL) where F LPU corresp onds to the detection latency for the face occurring in the lower area and the probe occurring in the upper area, and so on. Positive values re¯ ect selective attention towards the face (vigilance) and negative values re¯ ect an attentional bias away from faces (avoidance). The main analysis of bias scores wa s a repeated measures AN OVA with the between-subject factors being social anxiety group (high±low) and threat manipulation (social threat±no threat) and the within-subject factor being fa ce type. The emotionality and valence hypotheses were tested by planned contrasts based on the coef® cients of orthogonal polynomials (Rosenthal & Rosnow, 1991, p. 474). Evidence for the valence hypothesis would be provided by interactions involving the social-anxiety group and a face type linear trend when positive, neutral, and negative faces are given weights of + 1, 0, and 2 1, respectively. Evidence for the emotionality hypothesis would be provided by interactions involving social anxiety group and a fa ce type quadratic trend when positive, neutral, and negative faces are given weights of + 1, 2 2, and + 1, respectively. F urther possible differences in reaction times were explored in a repeated measures AN OVA with social anxiety group and threat manipulation as the between-subject factors and fa ce position, probe position, and face type as within-subject factors. The recognition memory test data were analysed with signal detection analysis. F rom the hits and false alarms, discrimination (d 9 ) and response bias (c) scores were calculated for faces and objects (M acM illan & Creelman, 1991). These scores were compared with repeated measures AN OVAs with social anxiety group and threat manipulation as between factors and faces versus objects as the within factor.

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RESULTS Mood Prior to the Dot-probe Task M ood ratings immediately prior to the dot-probe task were subjected to two-way Social Anxiety (high±low) 3 Induction (social threat±no threat) AN OVAs. All four mood ratings showed a signi® cant social anxiety group main effect, indicating that the high social anxiety groups were more anxious, depressed and angry, and less happy than the low social anxiety groups [F(1,67) = 52.4, P < .001 for anxious; F(1,67) = 52.4, P < .001 for depressed; F(1,67) = 52.4, P < .001 for angry; and F(1,67) = 52.4, P < .001 for happy]. For anxious ratings, but not for the other moods, there was also a signi® cant induction main effect [F(1,67) = 5.3, P < .05], indicating participants who had received the social threat induction were more anxious than participants in the no threat condition. There were no signi® cant interactions between social anxiety group and induction. M eans and (SD s) for anxiety ratings were: high social anxiety/ social threat = 54.3 (20.6); low social anxiety/social threat = 14.7 (17.7); high social anxiety/no threat = 36.5 (21.4); low social anxiety/no threat = 11.3 (14.9).

Modi® ed Dot-probe Task F igure 1 shows the bias scores for each experimental group for each type of fa cial expression. The three-way (Social Anxiety 3 Induction 3 Face Type) AN OVA showed a signi® cant social anxiety by induction interaction [F(1,67) = 5.7, P < .05], which wa s quali® ed by a signi® cant three-way interaction between social anxiety, induction, and a face type quadratic trend [F(1,67) = 4.2; P < .05]. To investigate this interaction, separate twoway AN OVAs were performed for the social threat and no threat conditions. The social anxiety by face type quadratic trend was signi® cant in the social threat condition [F(1,29) = 6.2, P < .05], but not in the no-threat condition [F(1,29) < 1]. Within the social threat condition, the face type quadratic trend wa s signi® cant in the high social anxiety group [F(1,14) = 10.8, P < .01], but not in the low social anxiety group [F(1,14) < 1]. Inspection of F ig. 1 indicates that in the social threat condition, the high social anxiety group avoided negative and positive fa ces more than neutral fa ces (emotionality effect), whereas the low anxiety group attended to all three types of face to a similar extent. Paired comparisons indicated that the high social anxiety group avoided emotional (negative and positive) fa ces more than the low social anxiety group [t(29) = 3.0, P < .01], but the two groups did not differ in their attention to neutral faces [t(29) = 0.5, P > .6].


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FIG. 1. Attention bias scores for face-o bject pairs involving negative, neutral, and positive faces. (A positive bias score denotes attention directed towards the face.)

Table 2 shows the reaction times for each of the four combinations of face and probe position for each of the three types of facial expression. The ® ve-way (Social Anxiety 3 Induction 3 Face Type 3 Face Position 3 Probe Position) AN OVA revealed two signi® cant main effects. As in earlier dot-probe studies, fa ster responses were observed when the probe occurred in the upper position [F(1,67) = 20.32, P < .001]. Faster responses were observed when the face occurred in the upper position [F(1,67) = 23.20, P < .001]. H owever, this main effect was quali® ed by a two-way face position by social anxiety interaction [F(1,67) = 4.05, P < .05], which indicated that speeded responses on trials when the face was in the upper position only occurred in the low social anxiety group. There was also a signi® cant ® veway interaction involving a fa ce type quadratic trend which is equivalent to the three-way interaction between social anxiety, induction, and the face type quadratic trend for bias scores reported earlier. Errors. The overall error rate wa s 3.6%. To determine whether the experimental groups differed in error rates, an error bias score wa s calculated for each participant using the same formula as for probe detection latencies. Table 3 shows the data, which was subjected to a three-way (Social Anxiety 3 Induction 3 Face Type) AN OVA. The only signi® cant effect was a three-way interaction between social anxiety, induction, and a face type linear trend [F(1,67) = 5.4, P < .05]. H igh social anxiety participants showed more errors to probes following negative faces than positive faces in the no threat condition [fa ce type linear

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MANSELL ET AL. TABLE 2 Mean Probe Detection Latencies (msec) for Face-Object pairs (Standard Deviations in Parentheses) Group Social Threat

Facial Expression

No Threat

Face

Probe

Low SA

High SA

Low SA

High SA

N egative

U pper U pper Lower Lower

U pper Lower U pper Lower

573 (75) 579 (87) 572 (76) 589 (98)

605 573 555 602

(101) (100) (83) (99)

545 558 551 580

(57) (54) (65) (62)

535 554 556 569

(105) (105) (114) (109)

N eutral



564 (91) 570 (88) 581 (72) 607 (74)

584 595 589 607

(90) (80) (77) (85)

541 559 566 589

(77) (42) (70) (63)

547 568 557 561

(102) (94) (122) (98)

Positive



564 (78) 591 (88) 566 (78) 607 (91)

589 573 568 618

(94) (95) (98) (82)

532 558 538 584

(58) (60) (64) (65)

542 554 548 566

(103) (96) (116) (91)

Note: SA = Social Anxiety.

TABLE 3 Face-Object Bias Scores for Errors in Probe Detection (Standard Deviations in Parentheses) Group Social Threat Facial Expression N egative N eutral Positive

No Threat

Low SA

High SA

Low SA

High SA

2 0.16 (0.40) 2 0.44 (0.40) 2 0.13 (0.43)

0.03 (0.48) 2 0.07 (0.46) 2 0.23 (0.46)

2 0.13 (0.53) 2 0.18 (0.57) 2 0.15 (0.46)

2 0.33 (0.63) 0.10 (0.72) 0.13 (0.53)

Note: SA = Social Anxiety. A negative bias score mean s more er rors occurred with probes following the face than with probes following the object.

trend: F(1,19) = 6.4, P < .05] and tended to show the reverse pattern in the social threat condition [fa ce type linear trend: F(1,14) = 3.8, P = .07]. U nlike the detection latency data, there were no interactions involving a fa ce type quadratic trend.


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Effects of Trait and State Anxiety and Depression on Selective Attention The high and low social anxiety groups differed in trait and state anxiety and depression as well as on measures of social anxiety. This raises the possibility that the between-group difference in attentional bias in the social threat condition could be due to individual differences in propensity to anxiety in general or depression. To investigate this possibility, the detection latency analysis was repeated using trait and state anxiety and BD I scores as covariates. The three-way social anxiety by induction by face type quadratic trend interaction for bias scores remained signi® cant [F(1,64) = 4.2, P < .05], indicating that the increased avoidance of emotional faces shown by the high social anxiety group in the threat condition was a function of a heightened propensity to social anxiety, rather than a more general vulnerability to negative affect. The effects of trait anxiety and depression were also explored with correlational analyses. Tra it anxiety was normally distributed. Within the social threat condition, trait anxiety failed to correlate with attentional bias scores for any type of facial expression. H owever, within the no threat condition there was a signi® cant correlation between trait anxiety and bias score for negative faces [r(39) = .40, P < .01], indicating that high trait anxiety wa s associated with vigilance to negative faces. The correlations between tra it anxiety and bias scores for neutral and positive faces [r(39) = .19 and .21, respectively] were not signi® cant. F inally, the correlation between trait anxiety and vigilance to negative fa ces wa s signi® cantly higher in the no threat condition than in the social threat condition [Z = 2.31, P < .05]. D epression failed to correlate with bias scores in either condition.

Recognition Memory Task Chance performance in correctly identifying old versus new faces or objects would be 50%. Participants performed slightly, but signi® cantly, better than chance [for faces, mean (SD ) correct = 55.5% (7.2%), t(70) = 6.4, P < .001; for objects, mean (SD ) correct = 53.3% (5.8%), t(70) = 4.79, P < .001]. Table 4 shows the signal detection analysis data. The d 9 (sensitivity) and c (response bias) were calculated using the formulas recommended by M acmillan and Creelman (1991). Three-way AN OVAs (Social Anxiety 3 Induction 3 Face Type) were performed on d 9 and c for fa ces alone, for objects alone, and for the object minus face difference on these indices. For d 9 there were no interactions involving social anxiety group or induction, indicating that the differential effects of social anxiety and threat on attention were not mirrored by differences in memory. For c (response

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MANSELL ET AL. TABLE 4 Recognition Memory Task Social Threat

Expression

Low SA

High SA

Low SA

High SA

0.09 0.32 0.12 0.14 0.17 0.15

(1.12) (0.82) (0.91) (0.91) (0.50) (0.58)

0.54 0.63 0.39 0.75 0.25 0.59

(1.52) (1.38) (0.81) (0.82) (1.21) (0.80)

0.22 0.98 0.53 0.85 0.48 0.41

(1.54) (1.24) (1.02) (0.88) (0.85) (0.88)

0.57 0.49 0.69 0.32 0.43 0.72

(1.24) (0.62) (0.92) (0.58) (0.87) (0.67)

Difference scores (object minus face) N egative d9 2 0.26 (1.39) c 0.17 (0.91) N eutral d9 0.23 (1.15) c 0.26 (0.90) Positive d9 2 0.10 (0.80) c 0.20 (0.51)

2 0.49 0.13 0.61 2 0.06 0.25 0.43

(2.12) (1.32) (0.80) (0.90) (1.90) (0.89)

2 0.16 2 0.01 0.26 0.06 2 0.28 0.57

(2.03) (1.35) (1.03) (0.87) (1.64) (0.93)

2 0.36 0.10 0.35 0.40 2 0.07 0.08

(1.44) (0.78) (1.60) (0.48) (1.43) (0.52)

Faces only N egative N eutral Positive

Index

No Threat

d9 c d9 c d9 c

Note: SA = Social Anxiety.

bias), there were no signi® cant effects in the object only data but there was a trend [F(1,67) = 3.29, P = .074], for a social anxiety by induction by face type quadratic trend interaction in the faces alone analysis. This interaction became signi® cant [F(1,67) = 4.09, P < .05], in the object minus face c score analysis. When high and low social anxiety groups were analysed separately, the induction by face type quadratic trend wa s signi® cant in the high social anxiety group [F(1,33) = 4.12, P = .05], but not in the low social anxiety group [F(1,34) < 1]. Inspection of means for the face only and object minus face data indicates that in the social threat condition the high social anxiety group had a stronger response bias towards identifying emotional (positive or negative) faces than neutra l faces as old (i.e. presented in the dot-probe task) whereas in the no threat condition the high social anxiety group had a stronger response bias towards identifying neutra l fa ces rather than emotional faces as old.

DISCUSSION The main ® nding of the study is that high socially anxious individuals show an attentional bias away from emotional (positive and negative) faces but that this effect is only observed under conditions of social-evaluative threat. In the absence of social-evaluative threat, high and low socially anxious individuals did not differ in attention to facial expressions. The


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latter result is consistent with Bradley et al.’s (1997, experiment 1) facial dot-probe study which did not include a social-evaluative threat induction and also found no attentional differences between high and low socially anxious individuals. The high and low social anxiety groups differed in tra it anxiety and depression as well as on indices of social anxiety. H owever, the attentional avoidance effect remained signi® cant when these non-social variables were covaried out. It therefore appears that avoidance of emotional faces under conditions of social-evaluative threat is speci® cally related to individual differences in propensity to social anxiety, not to more general differences in trait anxiety or negative affectivity. Indeed, correlational analyses suggested that social anxiety and trait anxiety may have rather different effects on attention for fa ces. In particular, in the social threat condition trait anxiety was unrelated to attentional bias whereas in the no threat condition trait anxiety was signi® cantly correlated with greater vigilance to negative faces, but not to neutral or positive faces. The latter ® nding is consistent with Bradley, M ogg, Falla, and H amilton’s (1998) recent fa ce dot-probe study in which high and low trait anxious participants were tested under no threat conditions. A recognition memory test was included to assess whether attentional avoidance of emotional fa ces leads to poorer memory for these fa ces. Overall, memory performance wa s only slightly above chance, making it dif® cult to assess the hypothesis. H owever, with this proviso, there was no evidence that high socially anxious individuals had poorer memory for emotional faces. A major reason for studying faces was to increase the ecological validity of selective attention investigations. Several previous studies have investigated the effects of social anxiety on attention for visually presented, emotional words. When socially threatening and neutra l words are compared, high socially anxious individuals show an attentional bias towards socially threatening words if tested under no threat condition 1 (H ope, Rapee, H eimberg, & D ombeck, 1990; M attia, H eimberg, & H ope, 1993) and this effect is suppressed under conditions of social-evaluative threat (Amir et al., 1996). Both of these results are discrepant with our ® ndings with faces, which clearly demonstrates that results obtained with visually

1 Some commen tators have suggested that Asmundson and Stein’s (1994) dot-probe study also demonstrated an attentional bias to the spatial location of threat words. H owever, the authors’ analyses revealed a somewhat different effect. On each trial, two words were presented, one above the other. Participants read aloud the top word, after which a probe might appear at the top or bottom location. When social threat words (rather than neutral or physical threat words) were at the top location, patients with social phobia responded quicker to subsequent probes in either (top or bottom) location.

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presented words representing individuals emotional concerns will not necessarily generalise to real-life threat cues. In contra st to the discrepancy in results between attention to socialevaluative words and emotional faces that has been observed in socially anxious individuals, Lavy and van den H out (1993) found that spider phobics show an attentional bias towards spider words and pictures. Why should spider phobics show attention towa rds pictures of spiders and socially anxious individuals show an attentional bias away from pictures of others’ emotional fa cial expressions? Consideration of the functional consequences of attentional avoidance and vigilance suggests a possible explanation. If a spider phobic is presented with a spider, looking away does not remove the threat. The spider is still there. Indeed, looking away fro m the spider may increase some aspects of threat as the phobic will not know whether the spider has moved closer. Looking at the spider (vigilance) would provide this information and hence reduce uncertainty. On the other hand, looking away from others’ faces and avoiding eye contact is likely to reduce some aspects of threat for a social phobic or socially anxious individual. If eye contact is broken, it is more dif® cult for the other people to ask socially anxious individuals questions or engage them in conversation. In this sense, attentional avoidance reduces some of the more threatening aspects of a social situation without the individual having to leave. It provides a psychological escape. The notion that attention can be related to escape as well as threat also appears in a recent experiment by Thorpe and Salkovksis (1998) who independently varied the location of a spider and the exit door. When spider and exit coincided, spider phobics showed greater attention to the spider than when the exit wa s at the opposite target location to the spider. Avoidance of others’ faces may also have an evolutionary origin as an appeasement gesture triggered by unwanted attention fro m a conspeci® c who is perceived to be more dominant (see D arwin, 1872; Leary & Kowalski, 1995, p. 154; Trower & G ilbert, 1989). Why should socially anxious individuals avoid positive and negative fa ces more than neutral fa ces? It is clear that negative faces are more threatening than neutral faces but one would normally assume that positive facial expressions are less threatening, and hence might be less likely to be avoided. In the context of a social interaction, positive and negative expressions in an individual are usually a response to something the other person has done or said. When brie¯ y presented with a face, socially anxious individuals may therefore shift attention away as soon as they have an indication that the other person is reacting, even though they may not have fully processed what type of reaction it is. In this way they could prevent further engagement in the social situation. Alternatively, the


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positive fa cial expressions used here could be interpreted as a negative reaction by a socially anxious individual (e.g. I am being laughed at). There are several ways in which the avoidance of faces observed in the present study could contribute to the maintenance of social anxiety. F irst, by attending less to other people, socially anxious individuals have less chance to observe others’ responses in detail and are therefore unlikely to collect fro m other people the information that would help them to see that they in general come across more positively than they think (see Rapee & Lim, 1992; Stopa & Clark, 1993). Second, avoiding looking at others is likely to make the socially anxious individual appear uninterested or bored. This is likely, in turn, to lead to the other people being less friendly to the socially anxious individual (Clark & Wells, 1995; Curtis & M iller, 1986). Third, several speci® c models of social phobia (Clark & Wells, 1995; H artman, 1983; H ope et al., 1989; Rapee & H eimberg, 1997) have suggested that reduced attention to external social cues is accompanied by increased self-focused attention and there are a variety of ways in which self-focused attention could maintain social anxiety. For example, Clark and Wells (1995) and Wells, Clark, and Ahmad (1998) have suggested that in a self-focused state, socially anxious individuals generate negative, distorted, observer-perspective images of themselves and use these images (and other interoceptive cues) to infer they are coming across less well than in reality. H ackmann, Surawy, and Clark (1998) found that patients with social phobia frequently report such images and there is some preliminary evidence (M ansell & Clark, 1999) that internal cues can lead to distorted impressions of appearance in high socially anxious individuals. Although high socially anxious individuals showed an attentional bias away fro m emotional faces in the present study, it is possible that under some circumstances they may also show vigilance towards, or fa ster detection of, negative faces or other negative social cues. For instance, Williams et al.’s (1988, 1997) model of anxiety and attention suggests direction of attention may vary with stimulus duration, with attention to threat being observed at short durations and avoidance being observed at longer durations. This raises the possibility that our high social anxiety/social threat group might have shown an attentional bias to negative (and perhaps positive) faces if the fa ces had been presented for a shorter period before the probe appeared. F urther research using shorter stimulus durations in the dot-probe task is required to de® nitively test this possibility. H owever, there are two reasons for suspecting the absence of a vigilance effect for emotional faces in the present study was not just a function of stimulus duration. F irst, our 500msec presentation duration wa s partly chosen because anxiety-related vigilance to threatening words has frequently been observed in the dot-probe para digm at this duration (M acLeod et

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al., 1986; M acLeod & M athews, 1988; M ogg, M athews, & Eysenck, 1992). Second, under no threat conditions, Bradley et al. (1997, 1998) found depression-related and trait anxiety-related attentional biases for negative fa ces at 500msec duration. It is therefore clear that vigilance to faces can occur with other emotions at this duration. Byrne and Eysenck (1995) used a perceptual ``pop-out’’ paradigm (H ansen & H ansen, 1988) to assess very rapid detection of emotional fa ces and found that, compared to low trait anxious individuals, high trait anxious individuals were quicker at detecting angry faces in a matrix of neutral faces and slower at detecting happy faces in a matrix of angry fa ces. Trait anxiety and social anxiety are highly correlated so it is possible that high socially anxious subjects will show similarly speeded detection of negative faces. H owever, high trait anxiety and high social anxiety had different effects on selective attention in the present study, so it is also possible that high social anxiety will not lead to more rapid detection of emotional fa ces. F urther research is needed to clarify this issue. F inally, Valjaca and Rapee (1998) recently found that, compared to low socially anxious participants, high socially anxious participants were better at detecting negative audience behaviours than positive audience behaviours while they were giving a speech. The experimenters explicitly required participants to intentionally monitor and detect audience reactions. If con® rmed, 2 the results of this study would appear to be consistent with Clark and Wells (1995) and Rapee and H eimberg’s (1997) recent models, both of which suggest that although social phobia is generally associated with increased self-focused attention and reduced processing of external social cues, there may also be a bias in favour of detection of negative, external social cues when attention is explicitly focused on other people’s reactions. M anuscr ipt received 13 August 1998 Revised manuscript received 27 February 1999

2

Veljaca and Rapee’s (1998) study is dif® cult to interpret as the design allowed the possibility of a contingent relationship between participants’ behaviour during the speech and the moments when stimuli that participants were required to detect were presen ted. In par ticular, stooges in the audience were asked to introduce speci® c negative and positive responses ``when they felt it was most appropriate’’ (p. 313). It is known that, compared to low socially anxious individuals, high socially anxious individuals tend to show more negative behaviours and less positive behaviours while engaged in stressful social tasks (Rapee & Lim, 1992; Stopa & Clark, 1993). It is therefore possible that the stooges found it easier to introduce negative responses at moments that might be noticeable to the high social anxiety speakers and easier to introduce positive responses at noticeable moments with low social anxiety speakers.


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