Visual Attention during Virtual Social Situations Depends on Social Anxiety

摘要

Theories of anxiety propose that people with phobias involuntarily allocate their attentionnfirst toward threatening stimuli and then away from these stimuli. Therefore, the currentnstudy assessed attention toward and away of social cues in virtual fear-relevant situations.nMore specifically, open visual attention was assessed by means of electroocculogram (EOG)-nbased eye-tracking combined with head-tracking. Participants viewed virtual persons withndifferent facial expressions (happy or angry) in a free-viewing virtual elevator situation.nTwenty-six students participated in the study. Actual anxiety was induced to half of them bynannouncing that they had to give a talk after leaving the virtual elevator. Habitual social anxietynwas assessed by questionnaires. Results indicate that participants initially attended morento happy than to angry virtual persons, and participants who expected to give a talk afterwardsnwere especially likely to sustain attending to the happy virtual persons and avoidingnthe angry persons. Correlation analyses revealed that higher social anxiety was positively relatednto initial avoidance of happy and angry virtual persons. Thus, higher socially anxiousnparticipants seem to initially avoid emotional facial expressions. These results confirm thenassumption that faces are especially meaningful for socially anxious people but contradictnfindings of an open initial hypervigilance toward threatening stimuli. The results indicatenthat virtual social situations are especially suitable to measure overt attention in an ecologicallynvalid environment.