Perception biases in social anxiety: Oculomotor and visuo-cortical mechanisms

University Of Florida, Gainesville FL

Investigators

Abstract

Project Summary Emotional dysfunction is at the core of many psychiatric disorders, including fear, anxiety, post-traumatic, and mood disorders. Thus, describing the neural mechanisms associated with emotional processing is a critical issue in mental health care. One important aspect of emotional dysfunction is the maladaptive deployment of attention to locations or features that contain potentially threatening information. In social anxiety, greater distress has been associated with findings of hypervigilance (more attention to threat cues) but also with perceptual avoidance of threat cues. The present project aims to address these conflicting results by characterizing the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying attention deployment in social anxiety. As a comparison, we will compare those with social phobia to a group with a snake phobia, as those with a snake phobia typically present hypervigilance without oculomotor avoidance, unlike those with social phobia. Previous attempts to define the neurophysiology of social threat perception have been hampered by the unavailability of conceptual and methodological frameworks for studying threat cue perception in complex scenes. The proposed research establishes a novel technique for combining electrophysiological recordings, high in temporal precision, with eye movement recordings. This approach, called steady-state potential frequency-tagging, is unique in that it allows researchers to identify distinct visual-cortical processes selectively activated by specific elements of a complex visual scene?even when the elements are spatially overlapping. We combine this innovative approach with a novel conceptual framework that considers changes in visual perception an active part of an observer's emotional response, to address the following Aims: We first define the visual cortical dynamics related to exploratory saccades (i.e., oculomotor-cortical coupling) in a free viewing situation, comparing saccades to threat cues (face pairs and naturalistic scenes) with saccades to neutral cues. Then we compare how individuals high and low in self-reported social anxiety different in these indices of attention deployment. Pursuing these aims allows us to address a long-standing controversy in the literature, and more importantly will define the neural mechanisms mediating dysfunctional attention biases in social anxiety. Such mechanistic knowledge is needed in the context of current efforts towards improving diagnostic assessment and identifying specific treatment targets for mental health problems.