Moderate effect of social anxiety tendency in the influence of prior social information on emotional attribution bias

Poster Session A - Saturday, April 13, 2024, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Sheraton Hall ABC

Yuka Hirayama¹ (hyu1114aaaaa@gmail.com); ¹Senshu University, Japan

Social anxiety disorder (hereinafter "SAD") is a disorder in which fear and anxiety in social and interpersonal situations and avoidance of these situations interfere with daily life. In prior research, attention bias has been identified as one of the factors influencing the onset and maintenance of SAD. However, to the author's knowledge, little research has been conducted on how contextual factors affect the attentional bias of SAD. This study explores the cognitive processing mechanism of anxiety in individuals with SAD, focused on social information about others as contextual factors. We investigated how prior social information about others affects emotion attribution in individuals and how SAD tendencies moderate the effect using behavioral experiments (emotion label and emotion match task). We found that individuals with higher SAD tendencies exhibited an emotional attribution bias in detecting emotion in the facial recognition of others, becoming slow in the situation. They recognized negative information about others in advance, and while they did not have an emotional attribution bias in the situation, they did not recognize negative information about others. This result suggests that the attentional bias, which has been considered a factor maintaining anxiety in socially anxious individuals in previous studies, does not occur in certain situations and may be reduced by adjusting environmental factors. This investigation is crucial for developing targeted interventions and improving diagnostic accuracy in SAD. Future research should focus on using a larger sample size to understand further emotion attribution biases in SAD and their impact on daily life.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions