Research Proposal - Investigating The Effect of Social Anxiety on Motor Response

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Running head: SOCIAL ANXIETY AND MOTOR RESPONSE 

        

The Effect of Social Anxiety on Motor Response

                                   The Effect of Social Anxiety on Motor Response                                Clarke and Wells (1995) put forward a cognitive model of social phobia to explain the processes that takes place when certain individuals enter a social situation. Their model demonstrates how increased self focused attention and decreased processing of external social cues can lead to the experience of social phobia. Based on such cognitive models of social anxiety, Hofmann (2007) determined that one of the primary drivers of this disorder is misguided self-focussed attention.  Ledley and Heimberg (2006) stated that socially anxious individuals take on an observer’s perspective and tend to be internal spectators of themselves. Zou, Hudson, and Rapee (2007) found that high-blushing socially anxious individuals demonstrate elevated levels of self-focussed attention; in the form of excessive focus toward their external appearance, thoughts, feelings, and behaviours.  It is believed that such self-focussed attention is integral to the maintenance of social anxiety as it exacerbates the self awareness of negative mental representations conducive to producing anxiety and excludes the processing of any positive social feedback (Moscovitch, Kim, & Taylor, 2004; Pineles & Mineka, 2005).                                                                                McEwan and Devins (1983) noted that highly anxious participants actually overrated how their anxiety would appear to others in their social setting. Similarly, research by Mansell and Clark (1999) found a positive correlation connecting perceived anxiety of the participant and the degree to which they overrated how their appearance would be negatively interpreted. Further to this, a study conducted by Mellings and Alden (2000) found a positive correlation existed for participants with high levels of social anxiety, linking self focused attention during social interaction and overrating of how their anxiety-behaviours would be interpreted by those they interacted with.                                                        Research supports that there is an association between anxiety, negative bias, and the reduced processing of social cues (Clark & McManus, 2002).  Those with social phobia tend to focus on negative mental imagery that they have accumulated from experience and they tend to recall this when in social situations with similar cues, leading them to focus on images that are not really there, but rather just a recollection of the past (Hirsch & Holmes, 2007). Further, in the presence of ambiguous situations, there is a tendency for social phobia individuals to evaluate these as negative events, given that they are involved in the situation (Clark, 2001). The reduction in processing of external social cues leads not only to the maintenance of negative views of the self but also the maintenance of their beliefs about how others view them (Chen, Ehlers & Mansell, 2001).                                                According to Mansell, Clark, Ethlers and Chen (1999), participants with social anxiety demonstrated an attentional bias away from emotional faces, being either positive or negative, in a socially evaluative condition. Interestingly, positive expressions were included here to see if they would be interpreted negatively, such as the feeling of being laughed at (Mansell, Clark, Ethlers & Chen, 1999). In a study conducted by Gilboa-Schechtman, Foa, and Amir (1999), a series of pictures of faces were presented to participants and they were asked to delete the odd face out. It was found that participants with social phobia were faster at distinguishing angry faces than happy ones, based on a neutral crowd.                         However, not all of the social anxiety research focuses on the same type of cognitive processing. In relation to conditions such as anxiety, Segalowitz (2007) and others take a more biological neuroscience point of view and suggest that things are more complicated than just sequences of stimulus, sensory processing, cognitive evaluations and associations. Neuroscience research puts forward that persons experiencing these types of fears are primed to engage in very early information processing systems in response to attentional biases prior to any cognitive evaluation (Segalowitz, 2007). Interestingly, social anxiety research is beginning to further explore this angle of research.                                                 Most recently, Miskovic and Schmidt (2011) found that individuals with social anxiety expressed higher levels of attention in situations of social threat. Building on previous studies, both time-based and salient dimensions of a stimulus were investigated (Miskovic & Schmidt, 2011). Using a dot-probe task, participants were exposed to combinations of angry and happy faces that varied in intensity from mild to strong and neutral faces. The faces were presented at exposures of 100, 500 and 1250ms. Consistent with past research as the visual presentation lengthened in time displayed, up to 1250ms, the participants level of attention to the stimuli decreased (Mogg, Bradley, Miles & Dixon, 2004). Miskovic and Schmidt (2011) noted that perhaps this was due to a longer interpretation of the stimuli and consequently a shift to self focused attention such as increased heart rate. Perhaps more interesting was that, in the neutral and angry face condition, participants with high social anxiety demonstrated hyper-vigilance in detecting angry faces during 100ms presentations. This means that they were responding to stimuli presented at exposures of less than 200ms and therefore information not usually available to conscious awareness (Miskovic & Schmidt, 2011). This raises the question of what role, if any, would pre-conscious processing play in maintaining attentional biases and therefore predisposing a person to experience social anxiety.                The proposed research will seek to build on the recent work of Miskovic and Schmidt (2011) and, based on the observations of Segalowitz (2007), would specifically examine the notion that pre-conscious processing plays an integral part in social anxiety.                          According to Eysenck’s (1992) hypervigilant theory, vulnerability to clinical anxiety stems from an attentional bias for threat (Mogg et al., 2004). Preattentive evaluation processes are believed to be strongly linked to such anxiety vulnerability (Mogg & Bradley, 2005). Such characteristic vulnerability is a product of threat stimuli being reliably encoded, along with emotional meanings, within the early processing stages (Mathews and Macleod, 2005). Such attentional biases, once induced, may lead to further vulnerabilities and subsequent stressors in the later stages that detail more elaborate processing and appraisal (Mogg & Bradley, 1998; Mathews and Macleod, 2005). Hence, vulnerability may involve not only lower thresholds for processing threat related stimuli, but also deficits in the elaborations and more complex appraisals that follow (Mogg & Bradley, 1998).                                        The involuntary aspect of anxious response has prompted researchers to identify and evaluate potential biases in the automatic processing of threat-related information (McNally, Otto, Hornig, & Deckersbach, 2001). Studies indicate that, for anxious individuals, a preattentive processing bias exists for negative information and this information is processed prior to conscious awareness (Mogg, Bradley, Williams, & Mathews, 1993). In the presence of a stressor, vulnerability to develop an anxiety response is increased as a function of preattentive biases towards threat (Verhaak, Smeenk, Minnen, & Kraaimaat, 2004).        Neuroimaging shows that brain regions are automatically activated in response to salient emotional stimuli and the evaluation of feature detection outputs occur outside of conscious control (Ohman, Flykt, & Esteves, 2001; Pessoa, Kastner, & Ungerleider, 2002). The amygdala has been identified as a mediator in the initial preconscious processing of emotional stimuli (Pessoa et al., 2002). It is known that the amygdala is active in preconscious processing of fear reactions and for providing a basic ‘quick and dirty’ analysis of stimulus features (Mogg & Bradley, 1999; Pessoa et al., 2002). The automatic processing function of the amygdala includes initiation of ‘freezing behaviour’ and the potentiation of the startle reflex (Fox, Russo, Bowles, & Dutton, 2001).                                                The neural representation of stimuli is a competitive process, so it can be seen that the preconscious detection of a salient negative emotion stimulus can bias pending operations via the influence of bottom-up sensory processing (Pessoa et al., 2002). Assessing of emotional valence and modulation of incoming threat-related stimuli can occur very early in preconscious processing (Pessoa et al., 2002). Increased neural activation and emotional modulation, occurring in early processing, can thus favour the likelihood of neural representation of these stimuli over their neutrally competitive counterparts (Pessoa et al., 2002). Mogg and Bradley (1999) suggest that the automatic orienting to threat stimuli outside conscious awareness is a reliable phenomenon and measurable physiological responses have been observed under sub-threshold conditions. As would be expected, anxiety prone individuals display a higher prevalence for threat superiority effects to such stimuli (Mogg & Bradley, 1999).                                                                                        There is evidence for preattentive analysis of facial expression for emotions such as anger (Fox et al., 2001). Angry faces have been shown to elicit greater threat-dependent neural responses than do sad faces (Bradley et al., 2000). Such research provides some evidence for the preconscious automatic activation of emotional response and the ensuing capture of attention (Pessoa et al., 2002; Ohman et al., 2001).                                        The research clearly suggests there is an identifiable social anxiety-based link between a preconscious recognition and environmental threats such as angry faces. It is also evident that when such preattentive recognition occurs there is an associated temporary freeze response of motor action. Furthering the work of Miskovic and Schmidt (2011) this study will investigate how socially anxious individuals respond to specific environment cues and the temporal effects, if any, on their physical motor sensory response.  The question is posed; do individuals who demonstrate higher levels of social anxiety also demonstrate slower motor responses when confronted with ‘fearful’ sub-threshold visual stimuli whilst carrying out a routine motor task?

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Method

Participants

In accordance with the UWS Research Code of Practice, 60 – 100 participants will be recruited for this study, and divided into two groups, A and B, of between 30 – 50, allowing for an even spread of participants per group. Participants will be sourced from the general community, having responded to an advertisement inviting them to participate in a study on Social Anxiety. As per Miskovic and Schmidt (2011), only participants who score over 30, indicating high anxiety on the Social Phobia Inventory (SPIN; Connor et al., 2000) will be invited to participate in part two of ...

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