Face value: eye movements and the evaluation of facial crowds in social anxiety

AI for Psychometrics: Validating Machine Learning Models in Measuring Emotional Intelligence with Eye-Tracking Techniques

AI, or artificial intelligence, is a technology of creating algorithms and computer systems that mimic human cognitive abilities to perform tasks. Many industries are undergoing revolutions due to the advances and applications of AI technology. The current study explored a burgeoning field-Psychometric AI, which integrates AI methodologies and psychological measurement to not only improve measurement accuracy, efficiency, and effectiveness but also help reduce human bias and increase objectivity in measurement. Specifically, by leveraging unobtrusive eye-tracking sensing techniques and performing 1470 runs with seven different machine-learning classifiers, the current study systematically examined the efficacy of various (ML) models in measuring different facets and measures of the emotional intelligence (EI) construct. Our results revealed an average accuracy ranging from 50-90%, largely depending on the percentile to dichotomize the EI scores. More importantly, our study found that AI algorithms were powerful enough to achieve high accuracy with as little as 5 or 2 s of eye-tracking data. The research also explored the effects of EI facets/measures on ML measurement accuracy and identified many eye-tracking features most predictive of EI scores. Both theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Social memory characteristics of non-clinical college students with social anxiety

According to the cognitive theory of social anxiety, the cognitive schema of people with social anxiety makes them easily attracted by threatening information and memory processing. Two experiments explored the social memory characteristics of college students with social anxiety. In Experiment 1, the study investigated the social memory bias of college students with social anxiety. In Experiment 2, cue word technology was used to investigate the social autobiographical memory amount and generalization degree of college students with social anxiety using cue words. The results showed that: (1) Compared with low social anxiety college students, college students with high social anxiety had a memory bias for negative social information, but did not have a negative memory bias for irrelevant social information; (2) Compared with low social anxiety college students, college students with high social anxiety had more negative social autobiographical memory; (3) Compared with low social anxiety college students, college students with high social anxiety have a higher degree of social autobiographical memory generalization. This study revealed that college students with high social anxiety had a negative memory bias toward social information, the amount of negative social autobiographical memory was larger and the degree of social autobiographical memory generalization was higher, providing new perspectives for future interventions in this population.

Out of Sight, Still in Mind: The Consequences of Nonfoveal Viewing of Emotional Faces in Social Anxiety

Background: Anxiety sensitivity social concerns (ASSC) is a risk factor for social anxiety disorder that may motivate avoidance of eye contact (i.e., gaze avoidance), thereby maintaining anxiety. Gaze avoidance displaces socially relevant stimuli (e.g., faces) from foveal (i.e., center) vision, possibly reducing visual sensation of faces and giving an opportunity to misperceive others as rejecting. Methods: We tested the effects of non-foveal viewing on perceiving faces as rejecting, whether there is an indirect effect of ASSC on state anxiety explained by perceived rejection, and whether the indirect effect depended on non-foveal viewing of faces. Participants (N = 118) viewed faces presented within foveal and non-foveal positions and rated how rejecting each face appeared to be, followed by ratings of their own state anxiety. Results: ASSC was associated with perceiving faces as rejecting regardless of face position. There was an indirect effect of ASSC on state anxiety ratings that was explained by perceived rejection, but only in the non-foveal positions. The indirect effect was due to an association between perceived rejection and state anxiety that was only present when faces were viewed in non-foveal vision. Discussion: The findings suggest ASSC may maintain state anxiety partially through the perceived rejection someone experiences while avoiding the gaze of others. This study supports cognitive theories of social anxiety and encourages cognitive-behavioral interventions for gaze avoidance in people with social anxiety disorder.

Bias and sensitivity in numerosity perception of negative emotions among individuals with high social anxiety

The cognitive model of social anxiety suggests an association between social anxiety and cognitive bias toward negative social information. This study investigated the numerosity perception of emotional faces among individuals with high social anxiety. Seventy-five college students completed self-reported questionnaires—assessing social anxiety symptoms—and a numerosity comparison experiment. In each trial of the experiment, participants were presented with a group of 16 emotional faces, varying in the number of faces expressing positive and negative emotions. They were asked to judge which emotion—positive or negative—was more numerous in the crowd. Bias and sensitivity in numerosity perception of emotions were estimated by fitting a psychometric function to participants’ responses. Individuals with low social anxiety showed a bias toward positive faces (t(17) = 2.44, p = 0.026), while those with high social anxiety did not (t(17) = 1.87, p = 0.079). Correlation analyses indicated that social anxiety was negatively associated with the parameters of the function (mean for bias and standard deviation for sensitivity; r =  − 0.34, p = 0.003 for mean; r =  − 0.23, p = 0.047 for standard deviation). Thus, our results suggest that socially anxious individuals lack the bias toward positive emotion and are more sensitive to negative emotion than nonanxious individuals in perceiving the numerosity of facial expressions.

Attentional Biases in Adults Who Stutter before and following Social Threat Induction

<b><i>Purpose:</i></b> We know that adults who stutter report higher levels of social anxiety [Craig and Tran: J Fluency Disord 2014;40:35–43; Iverach et al.: J Anxiety Disord 2009;23(7):928–34]. What is not clear is whether adults who stutter develop maladaptive attentional shifts, similar to what is observed in socially anxious individuals, in response to social anxiety. The purpose of this study was to investigate the attentional biases in adults who stutter compared to adults who do not stutter before and after social evaluative threat induction and determine whether responses are associated with objective and subjective measures of anxiety. <b><i>Method:</i></b> Twelve adults who stutter and 14 matched adults who do not stutter performed a modified response time paradigm, the dot-probe task, where they responded to a probe appearing behind one of two faces, one emotional (positive or negative) and one neutral. Participant’s reaction times were measured before and after a social threat induction task. Skin conductance levels were used as an index of induced stress. Self-reports of trait and social anxiety were used as subjective measures of anxiety. <b><i>Results:</i></b> Adults who stutter compared to controls exhibited an attentional bias towards negative facial expressions following a social evaluative threat induction. This effect remained when covarying for levels of trait and social anxiety. Before social evaluative threat induction, visual inspection of the data showed that adults who stutter compared to adults who do not stutter avoided positive facial expressions as they attended more to the negative facial expressions; however, these differences were not significant. <b><i>Discussion:</i></b> This study provides evidence for a maladaptive attentional behavior in adults who stutter when undergoing feelings of social evaluative threat. Results provide rationale for research aimed at assessing the use of attention restructuring in highly anxious adults who stutter.

Look at me: The relation between empathy and fixation on the emotional eye-region in low vs. high social anxiety

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

Fixation on another person's eye-region may be an effective measure of one's level of empathy. In the present study, we tested the hypothesis that this type of empathy measure may not be appropriate for individuals with high levels of social anxiety, since avoidance or hypervigilance attentional biases towards emotional faces are frequent in this condition.

METHODS

Using eye-tracking, we measured fixation time on the eye-region of another person in participants with low vs. high social anxiety, and we correlated this measure with empathy levels. In a second eye-tracking task, the two groups of participants were presented with pairs of emotional-neutral faces to determine the presence of attentional biases.

RESULTS

While participants with low social anxiety showed an association between empathy and fixation time on the other person's eyes, the association was null for participants with high social anxiety. Attentional biases towards emotional faces were absent in high social anxiety, but social anxiety correlated negatively with fixation on the eye region.

LIMITATIONS

Our sample was made up of Psychology undergraduates, and this may have had an influence on gaze behavior towards the eye region.

CONCLUSION

Fixation on the eye region is not a valid measure of empathy in high social anxiety, possibly due to systematic eye-region avoidance.

Self-focused attention vs. negative attentional bias during public speech task in socially anxious individuals

Enhanced self-focused attention (SFA) and negative attentional bias (NAB) towards social cues are characteristic hallmarks of social anxiety. It is essential to investigate these two attentional phenomena under socially relevant situations using comparable stimuli. In the present study, individuals with high social anxiety (HSA, n = 32) and low social anxiety (LSA, n = 29) were compared according to their attention toward self-related stimuli and toward positive, neutral, and negative feedback related stimuli. Video stimuli of moving indicators of self-anxiety-status and positive, neutral, and negative feedback from an audience were presented during an impromptu speech task (high anxiety condition) and a re-watching phase (low anxiety condition). Eye movements in response to the different stimuli served as readouts for attentional preference. An interaction effect suggested that the HSA group directed more attention to self-related stimuli relative to other stimuli and the LSA group only during the high anxiety condition. The LSA group exhibited a general attentional preference toward positive feedback, especially during the low anxiety condition. Meanwhile, only the total duration of fixation on positive feedback negatively correlated with subjective anxiety rating. Our results point to increased SFA rather than NAB in HSA individuals under social threats.

A systematic review of visual avoidance of faces in socially anxious individuals: Influence of severity, type of social situation, and development

Although visual avoidance of faces is a hallmark feature of social anxiety disorder (SAD) on clinical and theoretical grounds, empirical support is equivocal. This review aims to clarify under which conditions socially anxious individuals display visual avoidance of faces. Through a systematic search in Web of Science and PubMed up to March 2019 we identified 61 publications that met the inclusion criteria. We discuss the influence of three factors on the extent to which socially anxious individuals avoid looking at faces: (a) severity of social anxiety symptoms (diagnosed SAD versus High Social Anxiety levels in community samples [HSA] or related characteristics [Shyness, Fear of Negative Evaluation]), (b) three types of social situation (computer facial-viewing tasks, speaking tasks, social interactions), and (c) development (age-group). Adults with SAD exhibit visual avoidance across all three types of social situations, whereas adults with HSA exhibit visual avoidance in speaking and interaction tasks but not in facial-viewing tasks. The relatively few studies with children and adolescents suggest that visual avoidance emerges during adolescence. The findings are discussed in the context of cognitive-behavioral and skills-deficit models. Suggestions for future research include the need for developmental studies and more fine-grained analyses of specific areas of the face.

Gaze Behavior in Social Fear Conditioning: An Eye-Tracking Study in Virtual Reality

The vigilance-avoidance hypothesis of selective attention assumes that socially anxious persons initially direct their attention toward fear-related stimuli and subsequently avoid these social stimuli to reduce emotional distress. New technical developments provide tools to implicit measure overt attention on fear-related stimuli via eye-tracking in ecological valid virtual environments presented via a head-mounted display. We examined in 27 low (LSA) and 26 high socially anxious (HSA) individuals fear ratings, physical behavior (duration of approach), hypervigilance (time to first fixation), and attentional avoidance (count of fixations) toward virtual female and male agents (CS) during social fear conditioning (SFC) and extinction in virtual reality (VR). As hypothesized, generally SFC was successfully induced and extinguished concerning the fear ratings. Our findings partly support the vigilance-avoidance hypothesis as HSA directed especially at the first half of the fear acquisition their initial attention more at CS+ than CS- agents, and avoided subsequently the CS+ more than the CS- agents during the fear acquisition. In contrast, in LSA participants initial and sustained attention did not differ between CS+ and CS- agents during fear acquisition. We conclude that HSA individuals guide their initial attention to emotionally threatening stimuli and subsequently avoid the threatening stimuli to possibly reduce their emotional distress, whereas LSA individuals regulate themselves less in their (fear) responses during SFC. Measuring implicit gaze behavior within a well-controlled virtual environment is an interesting innovative tool to in deeply investigate the impact of attention on emotional learning processes.

A lack of differentiation in amygdala responses to fearful expression intensity in panic disorder patients

Patients with panic disorder show abnormalities in threat processing and regulation, both on a behavioural and neural level. Better understanding of the underlying mechanisms could help to develop new treatment strategies. In this study, we investigated brain region activation in 18 patients with untreated panic disorder (PD) and 17 healthy controls (HC) during the processing of emotional faces with fearful, happy and neutral expressions, using functional MRI. The intensity of the expressions was either prototypically high, medium or low. PD patients showed significantly increased activity in the dorso-medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) in response to faces in general and specifically for happy faces. While HC showed a decreased amygdala response to medium/low fearful versus high fearful faces, this effect was not present in PD: amygdala activation was stable across all fearful faces in this group. Psycho-physiological interaction analyses indicated more negative connectivity between the amygdala and prefrontal areas in the PD group during the task. Amygdala activation in panic patients appears to be less sensitive to decreasing intensities of fearful facial expressions and salience monitoring areas were less active during fearful faces in general in this group. This suggests PD patients might avoid more extensive processing of fearful faces.

Anxiety-Linked Attentional Bias: Is It Reliable?

There is substantial evidence that heightened anxiety vulnerability is characterized by increased selective attention to threatening information. The reliability of this anxiety-linked attentional bias has become the focus of considerable recent interest. We distinguish between the potential inconsistency of anxiety-linked attentional bias and inconsistency potentially reflecting the psychometric properties of the assessment approaches used to measure it. Though groups with heightened anxiety vulnerability often exhibit, on average, elevated attention to threat, the evidence suggests that individuals are unlikely to each display a stable, invariant attentional bias to threat. Moreover, although existing assessment approaches can differentiate between groups, they do not exhibit the internal consistency or test-retest reliability necessary to classify individuals in terms of their characteristic pattern of attentional responding to threat. We discuss the appropriate uses of existing attentional bias assessment tasks and propose strategies for enhancing classification of individuals in terms of their tendency to display an attentional bias to threat.

Facial expressions and eye tracking in individuals with social anxiety disorder: a systematic review

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is characterized by the fear of being judged negatively in social situations. Eye-tracking techniques have been prominent among the methods used in recent decades to investigate emotional processing in SAD. This study offers a systematic review of studies on eye-tracking patterns in individuals with SAD and controls in facial emotion recognition tasks. Thirteen articles were selected from the consulted databases. It was observed that the subjects with SAD exhibited hypervigilance-avoidance in response to emotions, primarily in the case of negative expressions. There was avoidance of conspicuous areas of the face, particularly the eyes, during observations of negative expressions. However, this hypervigilance did not occur if the stimulus was presented in virtual reality. An important limitation of these studies is that they use only static expressions, which can reduce the ecological validity of the results.

Examining the visual processing patterns of lonely adults

Prior research has shown that loneliness is associated with hypervigilance to social threats, with eye-tracking research showing lonely people display a specific attentional bias when viewing social rejection and social exclusion video footage (Bangee, Harris, Bridges, Rotenberg & Qualter, 2014; Qualter, Rotenberg, Barrett et al., 2013). The current study uses eye-tracker methodology to examine whether that attentional bias extends to negative emotional faces and negative social non-rejecting stimuli, or whether it could be explained only as a specific bias to social rejection/exclusion. It is important to establish whether loneliness relates to a specific or general attention bias because it may explain the maintenance of loneliness. Participants (N = 43, F = 35, Mage = 20 years and 2 months, SD = 3 months) took part in three tasks, where they viewed different social information: Task 1 - slides displaying four faces each with different emotions (anger, afraid, happy and neutral), Task 2 - slides displaying sixteen faces with varying ratios expressing happiness and anger, and Task 3 - slides displaying four visual scenes (socially rejecting, physically threatening, socially positive, neutral). For all three tasks, eye movements were recorded in real time with an eye-tracker. Results showed no association between loneliness and viewing patterns of facial expressions, but an association between loneliness and hypervigilant viewing of social rejecting stimuli. The findings indicate that lonely adults do not have a generalised hypervigilance to social threat, but have, instead, a specific attentional bias to rejection information in social contexts. Implications of the findings for interventions are discussed.

Extraction of mean emotional tone from face arrays in social anxiety disorder

BACKGROUND

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is characterized by intense fear when facing a crowd. Processing biases of crowd-related information have been suggested as contributing to the etiology and maintenance of the disorder. Here we tested whether patients with SAD display aberrant patterns of extracting the mean emotional tone from sets of faces.

METHODS

Twenty-one participants with SAD and 24 unanxious control participants had to determine the average emotion expression of sets of six different morphed faces ranging from happy to angry. In 20% of trials the six faces were randomly sampled from the entire happy-angry range. The remaining 80% of trials, considered the critical trials, had an emotional outlier: five faces were sampled from one-half of the emotional range, whereas the sixth face was sampled from the opposite emotional range.

RESULTS

Participants with SAD were less accurate than controls in extracting the mean emotional tone from sets of faces. Unanxious participants underweighted negative outliers and overweighed positive outliers when extracting the mean, whereas participants with SAD exhibited no such biases.

CONCLUSIONS

Results suggest a possible mechanism associated with the anxiety experienced by socially anxious individuals when facing a crowd.

Gaze-Based Assessments of Vigilance and Avoidance in Social Anxiety: a Review

PURPOSE OF REVIEW

A broad base of research has sought to identify the biases in selective attention which characterize social anxiety, with the emergent use of eye tracking-based methods. This article seeks to provide a review of eye tracking studies examining selective attention biases in social anxiety.

RECENT FINDINGS

Across a number of contexts, social anxiety may be associated with a mix of both vigilant and avoidant patterns of attention with respect to the processing of emotional social stimuli. Socially anxious individuals may additionally avoid maintaining eye contact and may exhibit a generalized vigilance via hyperscanning of their environment. The findings highlight the utility of eye tracking methods for increasing understanding of the gaze-based biases which characterize social anxiety disorder, with promising avenues for future research.

Eye-Tracking Evidence of a Maintenance Bias in Social Anxiety

Background: The mechanisms and triggers of the attentional bias in social anxiety are not yet fully determined, and the modulating role of personality traits is being increasingly acknowledged. Aims: Our main purpose was to test whether social anxiety is associated with mechanisms of hypervigilance, avoidance (static biases), vigilance-avoidance or the maintenance of attention (dynamic biases). Our secondary goal was to explore the role of personality structure in shaping the attention bias. Method: Participants with high vs low social anxiety and different personality structures viewed pairs of faces (free-viewing eye-tracking task) representing different emotions (anger, happiness and neutrality). Their eye movements were registered and analysed for both whole-trial (static) and time-dependent (dynamic) measures. Results: Comparisons between participants with high and low social anxiety levels did not yield evidence of differences in eye-tracking measures for the whole trial (latency of first fixation, first fixation direction, total dwell time), but the two groups differed in the time course of overt attention during the trial (dwell time across three successive time segments): participants with high social anxiety were slower in disengaging their attention from happy faces. Similar results were obtained using a full-sample, regression-based analysis. Conclusion: Our results speak in favour of a maintenance bias in social anxiety. Preliminary results indicated that personality structure may not affect the maintenance (dynamic) bias of socially anxious individuals, although depressive personality structures may favour manifestations of a (static) hypervigilance bias.

Emotional Reactions to Facial Expressions in Social Anxiety: A Meta-Analysis of Self-Reports

The current meta-analysis reviews 24 studies on self-reported emotional reactions to facial expressions (social rejection, social acceptance, and neutral) in socially anxious versus nonanxious individuals. We hypothesized that socially anxious individuals would perceive all face types as less approachable, more negative, and more arousing. After correcting for biases, results showed that socially anxious individuals, compared to controls, reported lower approachability to all types of expressions and higher arousal in response to neutral expressions. Variances among effects usually could not be explained by the proposed moderators. This suggests that current conceptualizations of social anxiety should take into account the willingness to approach social stimuli rather than global measures of emotion or arousal.

Attention allocation in social anxiety during a speech

Cognitive models assume that social anxiety is associated with and maintained by biased information processing, leading to change in attention allocation, which can be measured by examining eye movement. However, little is known about the distribution of attention among positive, neutral and negative stimuli during a social task and the relative importance of positive versus negative biases in social anxiety. In this study, eye movement, subjective state anxiety and psychophysiology of individuals with high trait social anxiety (HSA) and low trait social anxiety (LSA) were measured during a speech task with a pre-recorded audience. The HSA group showed longer total fixation on negative stimuli and shorter total fixation on positive stimuli compared to the LSA group. We observed that the LSA group shifted attention away from negative stimuli, whereas the HSA group showed no differential attention allocation. The total duration of fixation on negative stimuli predicted subjective anxiety ratings. These results point to a negative bias as well as a lack of a positive bias in HSA individuals during social threat.

More than a face: a unified theoretical perspective on nonverbal social cue processing in social anxiety

Processing of nonverbal social cues (NVSCs) is essential to interpersonal functioning and is particularly relevant to models of social anxiety. This article provides a review of the literature on NVSC processing from the perspective of social rank and affiliation biobehavioral systems (ABSs), based on functional analysis of human sociality. We examine the potential of this framework for integrating cognitive, interpersonal, and evolutionary accounts of social anxiety. We argue that NVSCs are uniquely suited to rapid and effective conveyance of emotional, motivational, and trait information and that various channels are differentially effective in transmitting such information. First, we review studies on perception of NVSCs through face, voice, and body. We begin with studies that utilized information processing or imaging paradigms to assess NVSC perception. This research demonstrated that social anxiety is associated with biased attention to, and interpretation of, emotional facial expressions (EFEs) and emotional prosody. Findings regarding body and posture remain scarce. Next, we review studies on NVSC expression, which pinpointed links between social anxiety and disturbances in eye gaze, facial expressivity, and vocal properties of spontaneous and planned speech. Again, links between social anxiety and posture were understudied. Although cognitive, interpersonal, and evolutionary theories have described different pathways to social anxiety, all three models focus on interrelations among cognition, subjective experience, and social behavior. NVSC processing and production comprise the juncture where these theories intersect. In light of the conceptualizations emerging from the review, we highlight several directions for future research including focus on NVSCs as indexing reactions to changes in belongingness and social rank, the moderating role of gender, and the therapeutic opportunities offered by embodied cognition to treat social anxiety.

Gaze perception in social anxiety and social anxiety disorder

Clinical observations suggest abnormal gaze perception to be an important indicator of social anxiety disorder (SAD). Experimental research has yet paid relatively little attention to the study of gaze perception in SAD. In this article we first discuss gaze perception in healthy human beings before reviewing self-referential and threat-related biases of gaze perception in clinical and non-clinical socially anxious samples. Relative to controls, socially anxious individuals exhibit an enhanced self-directed perception of gaze directions and demonstrate a pronounced fear of direct eye contact, though findings are less consistent regarding the avoidance of mutual gaze in SAD. Prospects for future research and clinical implications are discussed.

Autobiographical memory bias in social anxiety

In social anxiety the psychological self is closely related to the feared stimulus. Socially anxious individuals are, by definition, concerned about how the self is perceived and evaluated by others. As autobiographical memory is strongly related to views of the self it follows that biases in autobiographical memory play an important role in social anxiety. In the present study high (n = 19) and low (n = 29) socially anxious individuals were compared on autobiographical memory bias, current goals, and self-discrepancy. Individuals high in social anxiety showed a bias towards recalling more negative and more social anxiety-related autobiographical memories, reported more current goals related to overcoming social anxiety, and showed larger self-discrepancies. The pattern of results is largely in line with earlier research in individuals with PTSD and complicated grief. This suggests that the relation between autobiographical memory bias and the self is a potentially valuable trans-diagnostic factor.

Relationship between social anxiety and perceived trustworthiness

Four different patterns of biased ratings of facial expressions of emotions have been found in socially anxious participants: higher negative ratings of (1) negative, (2) neutral, and (3) positive facial expressions than nonanxious controls. As a fourth pattern, some studies have found no group differences in ratings of facial expressions of emotion. However, these studies usually employed valence and arousal ratings that arguably may be less able to reflect processing of social information. We examined the relationship between social anxiety and face ratings for perceived trustworthiness given that trustworthiness is an inherently socially relevant construct. Improving on earlier analytical strategies, we evaluated the four previously found result patterns using a Bayesian approach. Ninety-eight undergraduates rated 198 face stimuli on perceived trustworthiness. Subsequently, participants completed social anxiety questionnaires to assess the severity of social fears. Bayesian modeling indicated that the probability that social anxiety did not influence judgments of trustworthiness had at least three times more empirical support in our sample than assuming any kind of negative interpretation bias in social anxiety. We concluded that the deviant interpretation of facial trustworthiness is not a relevant aspect in social anxiety.

Investigating hypervigilance for social threat of lonely children

The hypothesis that lonely children show hypervigilance for social threat was examined in a series of three studies that employed different methods including advanced eye-tracking technology. Hypervigilance for social threat was operationalized as hostility to ambiguously motivated social exclusion in a variation of the hostile attribution paradigm (Study 1), scores on the Children's Rejection-Sensitivity Questionnaire (Study 2), and visual attention to socially rejecting stimuli (Study 3). The participants were 185 children (11 years-7 months to 12 years-6 months), 248 children (9 years-4 months to 11 years-8 months) and 140 children (8 years-10 months to 12 years-10 months) in the three studies, respectively. Regression analyses showed that, with depressive symptoms covaried, there were quadratic relations between loneliness and these different measures of hypervigilance to social threat. As hypothesized, only children in the upper range of loneliness demonstrated elevated hostility to ambiguously motivated social exclusion, higher scores on the rejection sensitivity questionnaire, and disengagement difficulties when viewing socially rejecting stimuli. We found that very lonely children are hypersensitive to social threat.

To be or Not to be Threatening, but What was the Question? Biased Face Evaluation in Social Anxiety and Depression Depends on How You Frame the Query

Scientific evidence is equivocal on whether Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is characterized by a biased negative evaluation of facial expressions, even though it is assumed that such a bias plays a crucial role in the maintenance of the disorder. The way of framing the evaluation question may play an important role in the inconsistencies of earlier results. To investigate this issue, an unselected sample of 95 participants (11 males) with varying degrees of social anxiety and depressive symptoms rated facial crowds with different ratios of neutral-disgust, neutral-sad, neutral-happy, and neutral-surprised expressions in terms of friendliness, approval, difficulty to make contact, and threat. It appeared that the impact of social anxiety on ratings was highly dependent on the type of question that was asked, but not on the type of emotion that was shown: a high degree of social anxiety was related to a more positive evaluation of crowds when friendliness was assessed. When asking about the difficulty to make contact, social anxiety was related to more difficulty. When the threat evoked by a crowd had to be evaluated, higher degrees of social anxiety were tendentiously correlated with higher threat ratings. Degree of depression, on the other hand, was negatively correlated only to approval ratings. In addition, with an increasing degree of depression, the negative impact that any additional emotional face had on approval ratings increased as well. The theoretical and methodological implications of the results are discussed.

Reduced sensitivity to emotional facial expressions in borderline personality disorder: effects of emotional valence and intensity

A heightened sensitivity towards negative emotional stimuli has been described for Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). We investigated whether a faster and more accurate detection of negatively valent information in BPD can be confirmed by means of a visual search task which required subjects to detect a face with an incongruent emotional expression within a crowd of neutral faces. Twenty eight BPD patients and 28 nonpatients were asked to indicate whether a set of schematic neutral faces (3 × 3, 4 × 4 matrices) contained a happy or an angry face. Besides valence, the intensity of the target's emotion was varied in two steps. BPD patients and nonpatients both demonstrated an anger-superiority effect. However, no higher sensitivity towards negative stimuli was observed in BPD compared to nonpatients. BPD patients seem to rely to a stronger extent on controlled, i.e., serial, attention demanding processes when searching more subtle social-emotional information with positive valence.

Eye tracking of attention in the affective disorders: a meta-analytic review and synthesis

A large body of research has demonstrated that affective disorders are characterized by attentional biases for emotional stimuli. However, this research relies heavily on manual reaction time (RT) measures that cannot fully delineate the time course and components of attentional bias. Eye tracking technology, which allows relatively direct and continuous measurement of overt visual attention, may provide an important supplement to RT measures. This article reviews eye tracking research on anxiety and depression, evaluating the experimental paradigms and eye movement indicators used to study attentional biases. Also included is a meta-analysis of extant eye tracking research (33 experiments; N=1579) on both anxiety and depression. Relative to controls, anxious individuals showed increased vigilance for threat during free viewing and visual search, and showed difficulty disengaging from threat in visual search tasks, but not during free viewing. In contrast, depressed individuals were not characterized by vigilance for threat during free viewing, but were characterized by reduced orienting to positive stimuli, as well as reduced maintenance of gaze on positive stimuli and increased maintenance of gaze on dysphoric stimuli. Implications of these findings for theoretical accounts of attentional bias in anxiety and depression are discussed, and avenues for future research using eye-tracking technology are outlined.