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Face Your Fears: Attentional Biases Toward Emotional Faces Depend on Specific Low-Level Anxiety Symptoms
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Category: Emotion | Stress
by Aaron Shilling—Western Illinois University; and Sheryl Reminger—University of Illinois at Springfield
This study investigated the effects of emotional facial expressions, social anxiety, and negative self-evaluation on attention in a nonclinical sample (N = 35). Participants completed the Self-Consciousness Scale (Fenigstein, Scheier, & Buss, 1975), the Brief Fear of Negative Evaluation Scale (Leary, 1983), and a dot-probe task that measured attentional biases for emotional facial expressions. Results showed that attentional biases for emotional faces were moderated by social anxiety, specifically the negative self-evaluation component. These findings support Rapee and Heimberg’s (1997) model of social phobia and Fenigstein et al.’s (1975) theory of social anxiety. Furthermore, they elucidate the components of social anxiety sufficient to direct visual attention and suggest that social anxiety should be controlled in future research.