台大心理系

Cognitive theories suggest that social anxiety results from attentional bias for socially threatening stimuli. In recent years, considerable attention has been focused on the mechanisms underlying attentional bias in social anxiety. Some researchers suggest that attentional bias for threat results from impaired attentional control ability. We conducted two experiments to explore whether socially anxious (SA) individuals display diminished attentional control. In the Experiment 1, a mixed antisaccade task was used to investigate SA individuals’ attentional control (i.e., inhibition and shifting) for non-emotional stimuli. SA participants had longer antisaccade latencies than non-anxious (NA) participants, indicating reduced efficiency of inhibition function. SA individuals showed no significant impairments of shifting function. In the Experiment 2, a dual task was used to examine the effects of cognitive load on attentional control for emotional stimuli in SA individuals. Participants performed a dual task consisting of an emotional antisaccade task and either a 1-back (low cognitive load condition) or 2-back task (high cognitive load condition). In the high cognitive load condition, the SA group had shorter antisaccade latencies than the NA group. However, SA participants showed higher error rates under the high cognitive load than under the low cognitive load, while there was no difference between high and low load conditions in LA participants. Our results indicate that: (1) SA individuals demonstrate reduced inhibition efficiency; (2) cognitive load diminishes attentional control effectiveness in SA individuals.