사회공포증 수준의 증가에 따라 나타난 정서지각 편향성과 시공간 주의배분능력 저하 간의 관련성 연구

This study aimed to investigate the changes of emotional perception biases according to the level of social phobia and the relationship with visuospatial attention allocation ability. This study used the Korean self-report assessment test (Korean version of social avoidance and distress, K-SAD) to measure the level of social phobia. Moreover, the emotional perception and useful field of view (UFOV) tasks were employed for measuring emotional perception biases and visuospatial attention allocation ability, respectively. A total of 118 participants participated in this experiment, and only 107 (males: 94, females: 13) data were analyzed due to the exclusion of response errors and other statistical problems. The average age of the participants used in the analysis was 21 years (SD: 3.64), and those participants were divided into three groups according to the K-SAD scores. Consequently, all experimental groups showed negative emotional perception biases in the emotional perception task, but the magnitudes of the biases of each group were not significantly different. Furthermore, the positive emotional perception biases were higher at higher levels of social phobia, which could be related to the tendency of interpreting positive stimuli negatively. In the UFOV task, the higher the level of social phobia, the lower the visuospatial attention allocation ability. These results suggest that the deterioration of visuospatial attention allocation ability potentially contributes to the increase of positive emotional perception biases by being difficult to perceive external stimuli. Thus, this paper discusses the potential contribution of visuospatial attention allocation ability to the increased perceptual biases of positive emotions as the level of social phobia increases.