The time course of attentional disengagement from angry faces in social anxiety

While impaired attentional disengagement from threatening stimuli is thought to enhance social anxiety, it is unclear when the impaired disengagement occurs accurately. We used a gap task (Experiment 1) and an overlap task (Experiment 2) to reveal the impaired attentional disengagement from angry faces in socially anxious people with non-treatment seeking undergraduates. High (N = 17 in Experiments 1 and 2) and low socially anxious people (N = 17 in Experiment 1 and 19 in Experiment 2) were asked to fixate on an angry or neutral face presented at the center of a screen. Then, they discriminated the peripheral target stimuli. When there was a temporal gap between the face and target in Experiment 1 (gap task), the reaction times (RTs) for angry and neutral faces did not differ for all participants. However, when there was no gap and the face continued to appear in Experiment 2 (overlap task), the RTs for angry faces in high socially anxious people were longer than those for neutral faces after presentation times of 300 ms or longer. In low socially anxious people, the RTs following the angry and neutral faces did not differ. These results suggest that high socially anxious people face difficulty in disengaging attention from angry faces after recognizing them.

Research highlights
► Attentional shift and engagement to the target were faster in high socially anxious people than in low socially anxious people.
► In contrast, impaired attentional disengagement from angry faces was observed in high socially anxious people after recognizing them.
► This impaired attentional disengagement from angry faces was specifically associated with social anxiety.