Autonomic Arousal in Social Anxiety: An Electrodermal Activity Study During an Emotionally Salient Cognitive Task

TL;DR

This study examined electrodermal activity in socially anxious and non-anxious individuals during a cognitive task with emotional stimuli, finding increased arousal in all but no difference between groups, highlighting context-dependent autonomic responses.

Contribution

It provides new insights into autonomic arousal in social anxiety during non-evaluative cognitive stress, emphasizing the importance of social-evaluative context in physiological reactivity.

Findings

All participants showed increased EDA during the task.

No significant differences in EDA between SA and NSA groups.

Highlights the role of social-evaluative context in autonomic reactivity.

Abstract

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is associated with heightened physiological arousal in social-evaluative contexts, but it remains unclear whether such autonomic reactivity extends to non-evaluative cognitive stressors. This study investigated electrodermal activity (EDA) patterns in socially anxious (SA) and non-socially anxious (NSA) individuals during an emotionally salient 2-back working memory task using facial expressions. 50 participants (25 SA, 25 NSA) completed both a baseline rest period and the task while EDA data were collected via the Shimmer3 GSR+ sensor. A range of EDA features, such as tonic and phasic components, number and amplitude of skin conductance responses, and sympathetic activation estimates, were analyzed using a standardized, interval-based approach. Results revealed significant increases in EDA across all participants from baseline to task, indicating elevated autonomic arousal during cognitive load. However, no significant group differences were found between SA and NSA individuals. These findings suggest that cognitive-emotional stress, in the absence of social-evaluative threat, elicits comparable physiological responses regardless of social anxiety status. The results underscore the context-dependent nature of anxiety-related autonomic reactivity and advocate for the inclusion of social-evaluative or recovery phases in future research to detect more nuanced group effects.