Face Perception in Social Anxiety: Visuocortical Dynamics Reveal Propensities for Hypervigilance or Avoidance

Rather than shifts between covert vigilance and avoidance of aversive facial expressions, social anxiety appears to confer a sustained bias for one or the other. While vigilant attention reliably increases with social anxiety severity for the majority of patients, the most impaired patients show an opposing avoidance. These distinct patterns of attentional allocation could provide a powerful means of personalizing neuroscience-based interventions to modify attention bias and related impairment.