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The Effect of Affective Context on Visuocortical Processing of Neutral Faces in Social Anxiety.

ABSTRACT: It has been demonstrated that verbal context information alters the neural processing of ambiguous faces such as faces with no apparent facial expression. In social anxiety, neutral faces may be implicitly threatening for socially anxious individuals due to their ambiguous nature, but even more so if these neutral faces are put in self-referential negative contexts. Therefore, we measured event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in response to neutral faces which were preceded by affective verbal information (negative, neutral, positive). Participants with low social anxiety (LSA; n = 23) and high social anxiety (HSA; n = 21) were asked to watch and rate valence and arousal of the respective faces while continuous EEG was recorded. ERP analysis revealed that HSA showed elevated P100 amplitudes in response to faces, but reduced structural encoding of faces as indexed by reduced N170 amplitudes. In general, affective context led to an enhanced early posterior negativity (EPN) for negative compared to neutral facial expressions. Moreover, HSA compared to LSA showed enhanced late positive potentials (LPP) to negatively contextualized faces, whereas in LSA this effect was found for faces in positive contexts. Also, HSA rated faces in negative contexts as more negative compared to LSA. These results point at enhanced vigilance for neutral faces regardless of context in HSA, while structural encoding seems to be diminished (avoidance). Interestingly, later components of sustained processing (LPP) indicate that LSA show enhanced visuocortical processing for faces in positive contexts (happy bias), whereas this seems to be the case for negatively contextualized faces in HSA (threat bias). Finally, our results add further new evidence that top-down information in interaction with individual anxiety levels can influence early-stage aspects of visual perception.

SUBMITTER: Wieser MJ

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4663271 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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The Effect of Affective Context on Visuocortical Processing of Neutral Faces in Social Anxiety.

Wieser Matthias J MJ Moscovitch David A DA

Frontiers in psychology 20151130

It has been demonstrated that verbal context information alters the neural processing of ambiguous faces such as faces with no apparent facial expression. In social anxiety, neutral faces may be implicitly threatening for socially anxious individuals due to their ambiguous nature, but even more so if these neutral faces are put in self-referential negative contexts. Therefore, we measured event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in response to neutral faces which were preceded by affective verbal i ...[more]

PMID: 26648889

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Project description:BACKGROUND:Theories of aberrant attentional processing in social anxiety, and anxiety disorders more broadly, have postulated an initial hypervigilance or facilitation to clinically relevant threats and consequent defensive avoidance. However, existing objective measurements utilized to explore this phenomenon lack the resolution to elucidate attentional dynamics, particularly covert influences. METHODS:We utilized a continuous measure of visuocortical engagement, the steady-state visual evoked potential in response to naturalistic angry, fearful, happy, and neutral facial expressions. Participants were treatment-seeking patients with principal diagnoses of social anxiety circumscribed to performance situations (n = 21) or generalized across interaction contexts (n = 42), treatment-seeking patients with panic disorder with agoraphobia (n = 25), and 17 healthy participants. RESULTS:At the principal disorder level, only circumscribed social anxiety patients showed sustained visuocortical facilitation to aversive facial expressions. Control participants as well as patients with panic disorder with agoraphobia and generalized social anxiety showed no bias. More finely stratifying the sample according to clinical judgment of social anxiety severity and interference revealed a linear increase in visuocortical bias to aversive expressions for all but the most severely impaired patients. This group showed an opposing sustained attentional disengagement. CONCLUSIONS:Rather than shifts between covert vigilance and avoidance of aversive facial expressions, social anxiety appears to confer a sustained bias for one or the other. While vigilant attention reliably increases with social anxiety severity for the majority of patients, the most impaired patients show an opposing avoidance. These distinct patterns of attentional allocation could provide a powerful means of personalizing neuroscience-based interventions to modify attention bias and related impairment.

Project description:Evaluation of facial and vocal emotional cues is vital in social interactions but can be highly influenced by characteristics of the observer, such as sex, age, and symptoms of affective disorders. Our evaluations of others' emotional expressions are likely to change as we get to know them and anticipate how they are likely to behave. However, the role of associative learning in the evaluation of social cues remains poorly understood. In this study, we investigated whether emotional ratings (valence and arousal) and reward valuation ("liking" and "wanting" measures) of neutral facial expressions can be altered through associative learning. We also examined whether emotional ratings and reward valuation varied with symptoms of anxiety and depression, disorders known to impair socio-affective functioning. Participants (N = 324) were young adults, ranging in scores across dimensions of depression and anxiety symptoms: "general distress" (common to depression and anxiety), "anhedonia-apprehension" (more specific to depression), and "fears" (more specific to anxiety). They rated neutral faces and completed a probabilistic learning task that paired images of neutral faces with positive or negative social feedback. Results demonstrated that pairing neutral faces with positive social feedback increased ratings of arousal, valence, and reward valuation (both "liking" and "wanting"). Pairing neutral faces with negative feedback reduced valence ratings and reduced "wanting," but did not impact arousal ratings or "liking." Symptoms of general distress were associated with negative bias in valence ratings, symptoms of anhedonia-apprehension were associated with reduced "wanting," and symptoms of fears were associated with altered accuracy over trials. Notably, the association between general distress and negative bias was reduced following the associative learning task. This suggests that disrupted evaluation of social cues can be improved through brief training.

Dataset Information

The Effect of Affective Context on Visuocortical Processing of Neutral Faces in Social Anxiety.

Publications

The Effect of Affective Context on Visuocortical Processing of Neutral Faces in Social Anxiety.

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