The effect of social anxiety on top-down attentional orienting to emotional faces.

One of the fundamental factors maintaining social anxiety is biased attention toward threatening facial expressions. Typically, this bias has been conceptualized as driven by an overactive bottom-up attentional system; however, this potentially overlooks the role of top-down attention in being able to modulate this bottom-up bias. Here, the role of top-down mechanisms in directing attention toward emotional faces was assessed with a modified dot-probe task, in which participants were given a top-down cue ("happy" or "angry") to attend to a happy or angry face on each trial, and the cued face was either presented with a face of the other emotion (angry, happy) or a neutral face. This study found that social anxiety was not associated with differences in shifting attention toward cued angry faces. However, participants with higher levels of social anxiety were selectively impaired in attentional shifting toward a cued happy face when it was paired with an angry face, but not when paired with a neutral face. The results indicate that top-down attention can be used to orient attention to emotional faces, but that higher levels of social anxiety are associated with selective deficits in top-down control of attention in the presence of threat. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Searching for emotion: A top-down set governs attentional orienting to facial expressions.

Research indicates that humans orient attention toward facial expressions of emotion. Orienting to facial expressions has typically been conceptualised as due to bottom-up attentional capture. However, this overlooks the contributions of top-down attention and selection history. In the present study, across four experiments, these three attentional processes were differentiated using a variation of the dot-probe task, in which participants were cued to attend to a happy or angry face on each trial. Results show that attention toward facial expressions was not exclusively driven by bottom-up attentional capture; instead, participants could shift their attention toward both happy and angry faces in a top-down manner. This effect was not found when the faces were inverted, indicating that top-down attention relies on holistic processing of the face. In addition, no evidence of selection history was found (i.e., no improvement on repeated trials or blocks of trials in which the task was to orient to the same expression). Altogether, these results suggest that humans can use top-down attentional control to rapidly orient attention to emotional faces.

What is top-down about seeing enemies? Social anxiety and attention to threat.

An attentional bias to threat is an important maintaining and possibly aetiological factor for social anxiety. Despite this, little is known about the underlying mechanisms of threat biases, such as the relative contributions of top-down and bottom-up attention. In order to measure attentional bias toward threat, the current study employed a variation of the dot-probe task in which participants' attention was initially cued to the left or right side of the screen before an angry face paired with a neutral face was displayed, and subsequently participants responded to a probe in the locus of one of the faces. This design provides separate measures of engagement with and disengagement from threat. In addition, in order to manipulate the availability of top-down attentional resources, participants completed this task under no, low (simple arithmetic task), and high (difficult arithmetic task) working memory load. Higher levels of social anxiety were found to be associated with increased engagement with threat under no-load, whereas this effect was eliminated under low-load and high-load conditions. Moreover, social anxiety was not associated with delayed disengagement from threat. These results highlight the critical role of top-down attention for engaging attention with threat.