Implicit processing of socially relevant emotional information in social anxiety – an eye-tracking and neuroimaging project

• Applicant: Dr. Vivien Günther
• Subject Area: Clinical Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 496949003

Social anxiety is characterized by intense feelings of distress in social situations and exaggerated fears of being rejected or embarrassed. Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is a common psychiatric disease and often follows a chronic course. SAD has a highly adverse impact on the life of affected individuals and on health economics. Thus, research on underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms of SAD is necessary to help decrease incidence rates and increase therapeutic success. According to cognitive models of anxiety, attentional biases to potential threats and altered perception of emotional stimuli play a crucial role for the development and persistence of anxiety symptoms. Earlier studies indicate a preferred attention allocation to angry faces, but findings are inconsistent and effects are small. To date, attentional bias research based on eye-tracking methodology remains largely restricted to facial expressions of anger. No previous study illuminated gaze behavior in SAD during the presentation of anxiety provoking social scenes. Moreover, studies mostly neglected facial expressions of disgust. This is surprising, given that disgust can signal disapproval and rejection, which are highly salient for socially anxious individuals. Notably, research examining the neurobiological bases of altered emotion processing in SAD, has rarely considered disgust faces. To date, there is no neuroimaging study in SAD allowing firm conclusions about automatic brain responsiveness to disgust. In general, amygdalar and insular hyperactivations in response to emotional faces have been described. Here, different emotional expressions were often pooled together for analyses, instead of focusing on specific emotions.By administering eye-tracking and neuroimaging (fMRI) methods, we aim to expand our understanding of attentional biases and neurobiological bases of maladaptive automatic emotion processing in SAD. The present project examines SAD patients and healthy controls by recording eye movements (1) during the perception of socially threatening and neutral stimuli (i.e., anger and disgust faces and social scenes), and (2) during a visual search task with goal irrelevant disgust, anger, and neutral facial expressions. Moreover, automatic brain responsiveness will be investigated as a function of group during the non-conscious perception of threatening faces in a (3) gender decision task with angry, fearful and disgust faces, and (4) during increased contextual threat.Treatment approaches that target maladaptive attentional processes and empirically based models of SAD may benefit from the findings of the present investigation. Insights into highly automatic aberrant emotion processing may provide potential explanations for the involuntary and uncontrollable nature of patients’ anxiety symptoms.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigators: Dr. Charlott Maria Bodenschatz; Professor Dr. Thomas Suslow