Information processing biases in social anxiety: An electrophysiological study
Jason S.
Moser,
Jonathan Huppert*, Elizabeth Duval & Robert F. Simons
Department of
Psychology, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA
Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety, University of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia, PA, USA
Studies
of information processing biases in social anxiety suggest abnormal processing
of negative and positive social stimuli.
It is unclear, however, if and how these biases manifest together during
the processing of motivationally relevant information. The current study employed event related
brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate the nature and time course of these potentially
dynamic biases. High and low socially
anxious individuals performed a modified version of the flanker task comprised
of negative and positive facial expressions.
Results revealed vacillations between a lack of positive bias and the
presence of a negative bias beginning during early stimulus processing and
continuing through early response monitoring stages in socially anxious
participants. These results begin to
shed light on how and when different information processing biases emerge and
interact in social anxiety.
