engleski

NEURAL PROCESSING OF SYMBOLIC SOCIAL INFORMATION IN SOCIAL ANXIETY: WORDS AND GESTURES

Social anxiety is a common human experience characterized by an intense fear of evaluation and rejection from others, which can seriously disrupt daily functioning and, expectedly, social life. Social anxiety is often associated with biased attention to social threat and negative self-focus. Symbolic information such as adjectives and gestures can provide critical information in social interactions and therefore be subject to altered processing in social anxiety. In this study, event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded to investigate how the brains of high and low socially anxious participants respond to verbal and symbolic gestural evaluation at the level of distinct processing stages, depending on their emotional valence and depending on their referential target. In two different experimental tasks, 21 participants with low social anxiety and 16 with high social anxiety passively read/viewed emotional and neutral adjectives/gestures while ERPs were recorded. Subsequently, all participants were asked to recall as many adjectives as possible during an unexpected recall test, and to estimate gestures for their valence and arousal. Biased processing of verbal and gestural threat as well as self-related information did not appear in high social anxiety during the early sensory stage P1. Increased EPN amplitudes for the middle finger gesture were found in high social anxiety in comparison to most of the other gestures that carried pleasant or neutral character. At later stages, high social anxiety was associated with reduced early LPP amplitudes for self-related stimuli, regardless of their emotional valence. This was followed by the decreased late LPP amplitude in response to all adjectives, whether self-referring or other-referring. In a free-recall test high social anxiety was related to a smaller intrusion rate than low social anxiety. The pattern of postrecording valence ratings was more negative for some of the unpleasant and neutral gestures in high social anxiety. These study results confirm the evidence of specific threat and self-referring processing in social anxiety, with possible stages of early hypervigilance and later cognitive avoidance suggested by Hofmann et al.’s (2012) cognitive- neurobiological model of anxiety. Additionally, they indicate that adjectives and gestures are suitable stimuli for psychophysiological emotion research.

social anxiety; event-related brain potentials (ERPs); words; gestures (emblems); self-referential processing

nije evidentirano