Temporal dynamics of emotional face processing in social anxiety
Ya-Chun Feng, Bo-Cheng Kuo, Wen-Yau Hsu

TL;DR
This study explores how people with social anxiety process emotional faces differently over time, revealing changes in brain activity linked to attention and perception.
Contribution
The study reveals novel ERP findings on how positive and negative emotional expressions influence attentional processes in individuals with social anxiety.
Findings
HSA individuals showed reduced N170 amplitudes in response to emotional face pairs.
Enhanced N2pc effects in HSA individuals occurred only with single emotional expressions.
No P1 effect was observed, suggesting early visual processing was unaffected.
Abstract
Previous studies have demonstrated that emotional facial expressions influence attention and perception in individuals with social anxiety. However, the relative influence of positive versus negative expressions on distinct subprocesses of attention and perception remains unclear. This event-related potential (ERP) study investigates the temporal dynamics of electrophysiological responses to emotional faces in high (HSA; N = 56) or low (LSA; N = 47) social anxiety individuals using a dot-probe task. Four face pairs (angry-neutral, happy-neutral, angry-happy, and neutral-neutral) were presented to probe the influence of positive and negative expressions. While behavioural results showed no significant group differences in attention bias, ERP results showed a reduced N170 amplitude for the HSA vs. LSA group in angry-neutral, happy-neutral, and angry-happy face pairs. Furthermore, enhanced…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAnxiety, Depression, Psychometrics, Treatment, Cognitive Processes · Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies · Face Recognition and Perception
