{"title":"Eyes tell all: Dissecting attentional bias in social anxiety through emotional faces.","authors":"Yifan Zhao, Chengshi Li, Yibo Jiang, Hongge Jia","doi":"10.1016/j.physbeh.2025.115045","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The present study employed eye-tracking technology and a free-viewing paradigm to explore the mechanisms of attentional bias toward emotional faces in individuals with social anxiety, using real and cartoon faces (angry, happy, disgusted, neutral) as stimuli. In Experiment 1, socially anxious individuals demonstrated significantly reduced total fixation duration and count on the eye regions of all four emotional face types presented by real people compared to controls. They also showed shorter fixation durations and fewer fixations on the facial area associated with disgust for real faces. In Experiment 2, both groups had longer total fixation duration and higher fixation counts on happy and neutral faces than on angry and disgusted faces. The findings suggest that attentional avoidance in socially anxious individuals is pronounced for the eye regions of real emotional faces, including positive ones, but not for cartoon faces. This indicates that attentional bias in social anxiety is influenced by both emotional and non-emotional social information in faces.</p>","PeriodicalId":20201,"journal":{"name":"Physiology & Behavior","volume":" ","pages":"115045"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5000,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Physiology & Behavior","FirstCategoryId":"3","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physbeh.2025.115045","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2025/8/5 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The present study employed eye-tracking technology and a free-viewing paradigm to explore the mechanisms of attentional bias toward emotional faces in individuals with social anxiety, using real and cartoon faces (angry, happy, disgusted, neutral) as stimuli. In Experiment 1, socially anxious individuals demonstrated significantly reduced total fixation duration and count on the eye regions of all four emotional face types presented by real people compared to controls. They also showed shorter fixation durations and fewer fixations on the facial area associated with disgust for real faces. In Experiment 2, both groups had longer total fixation duration and higher fixation counts on happy and neutral faces than on angry and disgusted faces. The findings suggest that attentional avoidance in socially anxious individuals is pronounced for the eye regions of real emotional faces, including positive ones, but not for cartoon faces. This indicates that attentional bias in social anxiety is influenced by both emotional and non-emotional social information in faces.
期刊介绍:
Physiology & Behavior is aimed at the causal physiological mechanisms of behavior and its modulation by environmental factors. The journal invites original reports in the broad area of behavioral and cognitive neuroscience, in which at least one variable is physiological and the primary emphasis and theoretical context are behavioral. The range of subjects includes behavioral neuroendocrinology, psychoneuroimmunology, learning and memory, ingestion, social behavior, and studies related to the mechanisms of psychopathology. Contemporary reviews and theoretical articles are welcomed and the Editors invite such proposals from interested authors.