Introduction

Research shows that socially anxious people may focus their attention primarily on threatening information. Selective attention to negative social incentives leads to more fear in this case and distorts the assessments of social events. This in turn in leads to ineffective social behaviour. A commonly used task to investigate the attention bias related to social anxiety is the probe detection task with faces. The participant is shown two faces, one neutral and the other threatening. In certain trials, one face is replaced by a probe (a letter for example). Participants must press a button when they see the probe. Faster response times for probes that replace the threatening faces indicate a bias for threatening information. Several studies have confirmed this bias, but there are also studies that have not found a significant attentional bias. An explanation for this inconsistency is that even if there is an effect, it is not expected that every study will find significant results, unless the effect size is very large, which is very rare in psychological research. Also in research where participants were randomly assigned and their attention manipulated, the hypothesis that an attentional bias towards threatening stimuli confers a sensitivity to negative affectivity in stress was confirmed. However, it may also be that the differences found show the direct and indirect measurements of the task on the mood of the participants. In general, individual differences in focusing attention on incentives relevant to threat and negative information appear to be important to mediate vulnerability to negative affectivity.

This study

Current research analyzes whether the attentional bias for threat is causally related to the preservation of social anxiety. To this end, the effect of a single session of attention training on reducing the anxiety response to a social stressor in people with social anxiety was investigated. Compared to the Attention Control Condition (ACC), it is predicted that the attention bias towards the threat will decrease through the Attention Modification Program (AMP). Less fear and better social performance are also expected.

94 participants were investigated for this. The following materials have been used:

• Self-report measurements (questionnaires).
• Behavioral assessments.
• Attention bias modification stimuli: the faces in the dot probe task.
• Attentional bias assessment stimuli: threatening and neutral words.
• Probe detection task (Attention Bias Modification Task): dot probe task with faces.
• AMP: the probe replaces the neutral face.
• ACC: the probe replaces the neutral face one time and the threatening face the next, every condition as often.
• Assessment of the attentional bias.

Attention training appeared to effectively reduce the attention bias towards threat and the fear response to a social challenge. Moreover, attention modification appears to be effective in individuals with a high level of anxiety. The most logical explanation is that the AMP task ensures that the participants separate their attention from the impending stimuli. It can be concluded from this that any procedure that normalizes the bias can reduce anxiety symptoms. In conclusion, the findings support a cognitive model of social phobia: selective attention to threatening social information may be causally related to the maintenance of pathological social anxiety. More and more research shows that fear is linked to deficits in attention control: anxious participants with poor attention control find it difficult to separate their attention from threatening information. In general, exposure is used as a therapy for fears. Current results suggest that not all forms of avoidance of frightening stimuli are bad.

Limitations

A number of limitations of this research are:

• There is no follow-up data from the participants. So it is not known whether the effects are long-lasting.
• The level of anxiety among the participants was average and no clinical interview was conducted to make diagnoses.
• For future research it is important to investigate alternative conditions of attention control in anxious populations.