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Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
The role of attentional bias in social anxiety is not yet fully understood. Social anxiety
individuals can show deliberate avoidance of socially threatening stimuli or, on the
contrary, be hypervigilant, persistently allocating attention to those stimuli. Our main
purpose was to test whether social anxiety is preferably associated with mechanisms
of hypervigilance, avoidance, vigilance-avoidance or maintenance of attention towards
socially relevant stimuli. Our secondary goal was to explore the modulating role of
personality traits in these attention bias mechanisms. Participants with high vs low
social anxiety and different personality structures were exposed to pairs of faces
representing different emotions (anger, happiness and neutrality) while their eye
movements were continuously recorded. Comparisons between participants with
high and low levels of social anxiety showed that participants with high social anxiety
were slower in disengaging their attention from happy faces, suggesting that positive
emotions can be perceived as a threatening stimuli for social anxious individuals.
Preliminary results indicated that depressive personality structure may favour
manifestations of hypervigilance bias toward threat faces.