Anxious and alert? Hypervigilance in social anxiety disorder

The vast majority of research on attentional biases to threat focusses on selective attention, even though several cognitive-behavioral models furthermore assume hypervigilance to be important in this regard. Thus, the current study examined hypervigilance in trait and state social anxiety. We analyzed visual scanpath lengths and fixation counts of participants with Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) (n = 61) and healthy controls (n = 60) in a combined visual search and eye tracking paradigm, including photographs of facial expressions. Half of all participants were randomly assigned to a state anxiety induction. Interaction effects revealed opposed attentional patterns of participants with SAD as compared to healthy controls considering overall visual scanpath lengths (F(1,117) = 5.32, p = 0.023, η2partial = 0.043) and fixation counts (F(1,117) = 5.10, p = 0.026, η2partial = 0.042). Accordingly, participants with SAD showed signs of hypervigilance in the anxiety induction condition. In contrast, there was no main effect of diagnostic group, indicating that individuals with SAD shift their attentional focus to broad scanning behavior only under conditions of threat. Our results add to the small number of existing studies on hypervigilance in SAD and suggest the topic to be promising for future research.