Time-course of attention biases in social phobia

•Fine-grained analysis of time-course of attention to social threat in patients with social phobia using probe-detection task.•Results did not reveal between-group differences in vigilance (initial attention allocated to threat).•Results suggest that patients with social phobia attended to emotional faces less over time, and specifically less to positive expressions.•Relative attention to emotional versus neutral faces suggests that controls (but not patients) preferentially attend to positive and avoid negative.•Findings suggest that attention “bias” in social phobia may be driven by a relative lack of bias (as compared to non-anxious controls).

Theoretical models of social phobia implicate preferential attention to social threat in the maintenance of anxiety symptoms, though there has been limited work characterizing the nature of these biases over time. The current study utilized eye-movement data to examine the time-course of visual attention over 1500 ms trials of a probe detection task. Nineteen participants with a primary diagnosis of social phobia based on DSM-IV criteria and 20 non-clinical controls completed this task with angry, fearful, and happy face trials. Overt visual attention to the emotional and neutral faces was measured in 50 ms segments across the trial. Over time, participants with social phobia attend less to emotional faces and specifically less to happy faces compared to controls. Further, attention to emotional relative to neutral expressions did not vary notably by emotion for participants with social phobia, but control participants showed a pattern after 1000 ms in which over time they preferentially attended to happy expressions and avoided negative expressions. Findings highlight the importance of considering attention biases to positive stimuli as well as the pattern of attention between groups. These results suggest that attention “bias” in social phobia may be driven by a relative lack of the biases seen in non-anxious participants.