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Attentional bias in social phobia
- "Social phobia (SP) affects more than 10% of American adults in their lifetime. A negative attentional bias is one of the best studied factors that contributes to the maintenance of SP; many studies have demonstrated that individuals with SP show biases to attend preferentially to social threat. Recently, researchers have begun to demonstrate that manipulating attentional biases can induce anxiety in non-anxious individuals or alleviate anxiety in anxious individuals. Therefore, it is important for both researchers and clinicians to gain a better understanding of the attentional biases that characterize SP. In the current research, participants with SP and healthy control participants with no history of mental illness completed three tasks: a behavioral attentional cueing task that yields separate measures of engagement with and disengagement from social threat; a free-viewing eye-tracking task in which positive, negative, and neutral emotional faces were presented for the participants to view over a 15-second period; and an antisaccade task that tests participants' ability to control the shifting of attention to positive and negative emotional stimuli. The results demonstrate a deficit in attentional control in individuals with SP on exposure to social threat stimuli, followed by avoidance of these stimuli. At long exposure times, attentional deployment seems to be influenced more by elaborative processes than it is by SP."
- "Attentional bias in social phobia"