SELECTIVE PROCESSING OF SOCIAL THREAT IN PATIENTS WITH GENERALIZED SOCIAL PHOBIA - EVALUATION USING A DOT-PROBE PARADIGM

There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that clinical anxiety is associated with cognitive biases that favour the processing of threat-related information specific to particular anxiety syndromes. Several cognitive psychology paradigms have been used to demonstrate that anxiety disorder patients selectively attend to threatening material that is specifically related to their particular disorder. The present investigation was an attempt to support preliminary reports suggesting that patients with social phobia selectively process social threat information. Twenty-four patients with social phobia (generalized type) and 20 healthy control subjects completed a computerized task designed to assess allocation of visual attention for specific stimuli (neutral, physically threatening, or socially threatening) via measurement of response latencies for dots that immediately followed their presentation. It was found that, when attention was allocated in the spatial location of a stimulus cue, patients with social phobia responded faster to probes that followed social threat cues than probes following either neutral cues or physical threat cues. This effect was not observed among control subjects. These results support the view that patients with social phobia selectively process threat cues that are social-evaluative in nature. The theoretical relevance and clinical implications of these results are outlined.