The angry face and the socially phobic adult: The time course of attention
Poster
The above poster is based on the article “The time-course of attention to emotional faces in social phobia” (Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 41, p. 39-44). There were two groups in this study, SP (Socially Phobic adults) and NP (Non-phobic adults, the control group). Each group viewed faces and objects on a computer monitor while an eye tracking device recorded their eye movement. Participants were instructed to look wherever they liked.
The hypothesis was that socially phobic adults would show an early bias toward negative faces on face-face trials and would avoid faces in favor of objects on face-object trials. Face-face pairs consisted of angry and happy faces paired with a neutral face, and the face-object pairs were angry, happy and neutral faces paired with objects (like a vacuum, phone, lamp, table).
The results indicated support for the hypothesis. Socially phobic adults show an early bias towards negative faces, which can clearly be seen in this graph:
The focus of the article was on the left half of the above graph compared to the right graph. You can see that socially phobic adults fixated on angry faces more than the control group. It’s also clear that the socially phobic adults and the control group fixated on happy faces more equally. So the question that Professor Arnell asked me was: do you think socially phobic adults fixate more on angry faces, or is it just that most people typically avoid looking at negative faces? It’s clear from the article that they thought the most interesting part of their data was socially phobic adults fixating on the negative faces. However, this might not be the case.
Something that was either missed or just not added in is that it’s more interesting to look at the control group data in this graph. There’s such a huge difference between the control group’s number of fixations on the happy faces compared to the angry faces, that it’s probably more likely that most people just avoid looking at negative stimulus.
– Posted by Alyssa Pilkington
Variety Psychology 