Goal-directed utilization of threat-relevant and non-threat-relevant expressions in social anxiety: A general deficit related to social-emotional cues in an endogenous cueing task

Abstract

Background: In various social-emotional situations, it is desirable to use emotional information in a flexible, goaldirected manner. When testing this flexibility in an endogenous spatial cueing task, in which threat-related facial expressions served as informative cues, socially anxious individuals showed a deficit in using the cues for taskrelevant attention orienting (Folyi, Rohr, & Wentura, 2023). The present study investigated the scope of the social anxiety-related deficit in endogenous cueing by testing whether it is specifically related to threat-relevant emotions or extends to non-threat-relevant emotional faces. Methods: First, we assessed social anxiety; second, participants with low or high social anxiety were invited to the experiment. In a block-balanced design, we presented threat-relevant (i.e., anger and fear) or non-threat-relevant (i.e., sadness and joy) expression cues to test if reduced cueing in high compared to low social anxiety extends to non-threat-relevant cues. Results: Whereas participants with low social anxiety showed a significant cueing effect, participants with high social anxiety had no significant effect. This pattern extended to all emotional faces. However, the significant group difference was limited to the first of the two task blocks, possibly due to extensive practice and carry-over effects. Limitations: Identifying the exact processes that hinder the flexible usage of emotional information remains an important question for future research. Conclusions: Our results suggest that prepotent responses to social-emotional stimuli in general can hinder their goal-directed use in socially anxious individuals. Such an imbalance may have clinical implications, as it may interfere with overcoming rigid emotional responses to social-emotional stimuli.