Social anxiety and attentional biases: A top-down contribution?

Selective attention toward threatening facial expressions has been found to precipitate and maintain symptoms of social anxiety. However, the automaticity of this bias is under debate. In the present study, we aimed to test whether top-down (controlled) engagement and disengagement of attention toward threatening faces is associated with social anxiety. This was examined by testing the impact of a secondary working memory (WM) load on attentional biases. In a variation of the dot-probe task, participants’ attention was initially cued to the left or right of fixation before an upright face paired with an inverted face was presented (displaying a disgust or neutral expression), and participants responded to a subsequently presented probe. The task was performed under no-load, low-load (one-digit memory task), and high-load (six-digit memory task) conditions. Social anxiety was not found to be associated with delayed disengagement from threat. However, surprisingly, high social anxiety was associated with an engagement bias away from threat, whereas low social anxiety was associated with a bias toward threat. These results were unaffected by the WM load manipulation. This indicates that engagement with threatening facial expressions has minimal contributions from top-down mechanisms, since it is likely that orienting to facial expressions occurs relatively automatically.