Fernandes, CatarinaSilva, SusanaPires, JoanaReis, AlexandraJiménez-Ros, Antonia MaríaJaneiro, LuísFaisca, LuisMartins, A.2020-07-082020-07-082019-102184-6170http://hdl.handle.net/10400.1/14062The 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.porother