Early hypervigilance and sustained attention for the eye region in adolescents with social anxiety disorder

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is a highly prevalent and debilitating affliction that typically manifests during childhood and adolescence. While theoretical models of adult SAD emphasize the role of attentional biases, little is known about maintaining factors during childhood and adolescence. The objective of our eye-tracking study was to determine whether youth with SAD exhibit a hypervigilance-avoidance pattern of visual attention for faces. To this end, we used a free-viewing paradigm to present angry, happy, and neutral faces, and non-social object stimuli to three groups of adolescents aged 10–15 years: SAD (n = 57), specific phobia (SP; n = 41), and healthy controls (HC; n = 65). A screen-based eye tracker recorded gaze behavior and pupil dilation. Among participants, only older adolescents with SAD exhibited shorter latencies of first fixation to the eye region compared to HC. Contrary to our expectations, there were no differences in duration of first fixation to the eye region among the groups. Instead, compared to HC, older adolescents with SAD showed longer dwell times on the eye region during the first 1000 – 3000 ms of stimulus presentation. No significant differences among the groups were found regarding scanpath length or pupillary reactivity. Taken together, our findings suggest early hypervigilance followed by sustained attention to the eye region in older adolescents with SAD, which may indicate difficulties in disengaging attention. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications in detail.