Psychological medicine
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Psychological medicine · Jul 2009
Electrophysiological evidence of attentional biases in social anxiety disorder.
Previous studies investigating attentional biases in social anxiety disorder (SAD) have yielded mixed results. Recent event-related potential (ERP) studies using the dot-probe paradigm in non-anxious participants have shown that the P1 component is sensitive to visuospatial attention towards emotional faces. We used a dot-probe task in conjunction with high-density ERPs and source localization to investigate attentional biases in SAD. ⋯ The results provide electrophysiological support for early hypervigilance to angry faces in SAD with involvement of the FG, and reduced visual processing of emotionally salient locations at later stages of information processing, which might be a manifestation of attentional avoidance.