The Psychophysiology of Social Anxiety the Psychophysiology of Social Anxiety: an Integrative Approach

While previous work has shown that social anxiety is associated with heightened responses to socially threatening stimuli, little is known about the temporal dynamics of processing biases or how they unfold in response to fluctuating socio-emotional contexts. This study recorded event-related cortical electrophysiology while high and low socially anxious individuals performed a three-stimulus oddball experiment that involved repetitive presentations of a neutral face (probability = 80%) combined with rare emotional faces (threatening and friendly; probability 10% per expression). Analyses focused on two broad components of the electrocortical response: (i) a relative negative voltage shift over the occipito-temporal cortex in an early processing stage (240 to 280 msec post-stimulus), associated with affective salience detection and (ii) a midline distributed cortical positivity that onsets roughly 300 msec. post-stimulus onset and is associated with sustained attentional processing and memory-encoding. Results showed that the early negative potential over secondary visual cortex was slightly enhanced among high socially anxious adults when detecting contextually novel threatening faces. No differences emerged in the electrocortical signatures associated with later, controlled processing stages. Findings suggest that high socially anxious adults are hyperresponsive to threat-related changes in socio-emotional contexts, at least at the early stages of information processing.