Attentional biases for facial expressions in social phobia: The face-in-the-crowd paradigm

The present study examines the attentional bias hypothesis for individuals with generalised social phobia (GSPs). Socially phobic individuals were hyp othesised to exhibit attentional bias towards threat stimuli relevant to in terpersonal situations. This hypothesis was tested using the face-in-the-cr owd paradigm. GSPs and nonanxious controls (NACs) detected an angry, happy, neutral, or disgust target face in a crowd of 12 distracter photographs. R esults indicated that, compared to NACs, GSPs exhibited greater attentional biases for angry than for happy faces in a neutral crowd. GSPs were more s lowed down in their performance by happy and angry versus neutral distracte rs; NACs did not exhibit such sensitivity to distracter type. Finally, GSPs were faster in detecting anger than disgust expressions; NACs detected bot h types of faces equally quickly. Implications of these findings for the ma intenance of social phobia are discussed.