@phdthesis{LangeneSoehnchen2020, author = {Lange [n{\´e} S{\"o}hnchen], Bastian}, title = {Influence of social anxiety on social attention and corresponding changes in action patterns}, doi = {10.25972/OPUS-18900}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-189001}, school = {Universit{\"a}t W{\"u}rzburg}, year = {2020}, abstract = {People who suffer Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) are under substantial personal distress and endure impaired normal functioning in at least some parts of everyday life. Next, to the personal suffering, there are also the immense public health costs to consider, as SAD is the most common anxiety disorder and thereby one of the major psychiatric disorders in general. Over the last years, fundamental research found cognitive factors as essential components in the development and maintenance of social fears. Following leading cognitive models, avoidance behaviors are thought to be an important factor in maintaining the developed social anxieties. Therefore, this thesis aims to deepen the knowledge of avoidance behaviors exhibited in social anxiety, which allows to get a better understanding of how SAD is maintained. To reach this goal three studies were conducted, each using a different research approach. In the first study cutting-edge Virtual Reality (VR) equipment was used to immerse participants in a virtual environment. In this virtual setting, High Socially Anxious (HSA) individuals and matched controls had to execute a social Approach-Avoidance Task (AAT). In the task, participants had to pass a virtual person displaying neutral or angry facial expressions. By using a highly immersive VR apparatus, the first described study took the initial step in establishing a new VR task for the implicit research on social approach-avoidance behaviors. By moving freely through a VR environment, participants experienced near real-life social situations. By tracking body and head movements, physical and attentional approach-avoidance processes were studied. The second study looked at differences in attention shifts initiated by gaze-cues of neutral or emotional faces. Comparing HSA and controls, enabled a closer look at attention re-allocation with special focus on social stimuli. Further, context conditioning was used to compare task performance in a safe and in a threatening environment. Next to behavioral performance, the study also investigated neural activity using Electroencephalography (EEG) primarily looking at the N2pc component. In the third study, eye movements of HSA and Low Socially Anxious (LSA) were analyzed using an eye-tracking apparatus while participants executed a computer task. The participants' tasks consisted of the detection of either social or non-social stimuli in complex visual settings. The study intended to compare attention shifts towards social components between these two tasks and how high levels of social anxiety influence them. In other words, the measurements of eye movements enabled the investigation to what extent social attention is task-dependent and how it is influenced by social anxiety. With the three described studies, three different approaches were used to get an in-depth understanding of what avoidance behaviors in SAD are and to which extent they are exhibited. Overall, the results showed that HSA individuals exhibited exaggerated physical and attentional avoidance behavior. Furthermore, the results highlighted that the task profoundly influences attention allocation. Finally, all evidence indicates that avoidance behaviors in SAD are exceedingly complex. They are not merely based on the fear of a particular stimulus, but rather involve highly compound cognitive processes, which surpass the simple avoidance of threatening stimuli. To conclude, it is essential that further research is conducted with special focus on SAD, its maintaining factors, and the influence of the chosen research task and method.}, subject = {Sozialangst}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Ahrens2020, author = {Ahrens, Lea Marlen}, title = {The Role of Attentional Control and Fear Acquisition and Generalization in Social Anxiety Disorder}, doi = {10.25972/OPUS-17162}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-171622}, school = {Universit{\"a}t W{\"u}rzburg}, year = {2020}, abstract = {Although Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is one of the most prevalent mental disorders, still little is known about its development and maintenance. Cognitive models assume that deviations in attentional as well as associative learning processes play a role in the etiology of SAD. Amongst others, deficits in inhibitory attentional control as well as aberrations during fear generalization, which have already been observed in other anxiety disorders, are two candidate mechanisms that might contribute to the onset and retention of SAD. However, a review of the literature shows that there is a lack of research relating to these topics. Thus, the aim of the present thesis was to examine in which way individuals with SAD differ from healthy controls regarding attentional control and generalization of acquired fear during the processing of social stimuli. Study 1 tested whether impairment in the inhibitory control of attention is a feature of SAD, and how it might be influenced by emotional expression and gaze direction of an interactional partner. For this purpose, individuals with SAD and healthy controls (HC) participated in an antisaccade task with faces displaying different emotional expressions (angry, neutral and happy) and gaze directions (direct and averted) serving as target stimuli. While the participants performed either pro- or antisaccades in response to the peripherally presented faces, their gaze behavior was recorded via eye-tracking, and ratings of valence and arousal were obtained. Results revealed that both groups showed prolonged latencies and increased error rates in trials with correct anti- compared to prosaccades. However, there were no differences between groups with regard to response latency or error rates, indicating that SAD patients did not exhibit impairment on inhibitory attentional control in comparison to HC during eye-tracking. Possible explanations for this finding could be that reduced inhibitory attentional control in SAD only occurs under certain circumstances, for example, when these individuals currently run the risk of being negatively evaluated by others and not in the mere presence of phobic stimuli, or when the cognitive load of a task is so high that it cannot be unwound by compensatory strategies, such as putting more effort into a task. As not only deviations in attentional, but also associative learning processes might be pathogenic markers of SAD, these mechanisms were further addressed in the following experiments. Study 2 is the first that attempted to investigate the generalization of conditioned fear in patients with SAD. To this end, patients with SAD and HC were conditioned to two neutral female faces serving as conditioned stimuli (CS+: reinforced; CS-: non-reinforced) and a fearful face paired with a loud scream serving as unconditioned stimulus (US). Fear generalization was tested by presenting morphs of the two faces (GS: generalization stimuli), which varied in their similarity to the original faces. During the whole experiment, self-report ratings, heart rate (HR) and skin conductance responses (SCR) were recorded. Results demonstrated that SAD patients rated all stimuli as less pleasant and more arousing, and overestimated the occurrence of the US compared to HC, indicating a general hyperarousal in individuals with SAD. In addition, ratings and SCR indicated that both groups generalized their acquired fear from the CS+ to intermediate GSs as a function of their similarity to the CS+. However, except for the HR data, which indicated that only SAD patients but not HC displayed a generalization response in this measure, most of the results did not support the hypothesis that SAD is characterized by overgeneralization. A plausible reason for this finding could be that overgeneralization is just a key characteristic of some anxiety disorders and SAD is not one of them. Still, other factors, such as comorbidities in the individuals with SAD, could also have had an influence on the results, which is why overgeneralization was further examined in study 3. The aim of study 3 was to investigate fear generalization on a neuronal level. Hence, high (HSA) and low socially anxious participants (LSA) underwent a conditioning paradigm, which was an adaption of the experimental design used study 2 for EEG. During the experiment, steady-state visually evoked potentials (ssVEPs) and ratings of valence and arousal were recorded. Analyses revealed significant generalization gradients in all ratings with highest fear responses to the CS+ and a progressive decline of these reactions with increasing similarity to the CS-. In contrast, the generalization gradient on a neuronal level showed highest amplitudes for the CS+ and a reduction in amplitude to the most proximal, but not distal GSs in the ssVEP signal, which might be interpreted as lateral inhibition in the visual cortex. The observed dissociation among explicit and implicit measures points to different functions of behavioral and sensory cortical processes during fear generalization: While the ratings might reflect an individual's consciously increased readiness to react to threat, the lateral inhibition pattern in the occipital cortex might serve to maximize the contrast among stimuli with and without affective value and thereby improve adaptive behavior. As no group differences could be observed, the finding of study 2 that overgeneralization does not seem to be a marker of SAD is further consolidated. In sum, the conducted experiments suggest that individuals with SAD are characterized by a general hyperarousal during the exposition to disorder-relevant stimuli as indicated by enhanced arousal and reduced valence ratings of the stimuli compared to HC. However, the hypotheses that reduced inhibitory attentional control and overgeneralization of conditioned fear are markers of SAD were mostly not confirmed. Further research is required to elucidate whether they only occur under certain circumstances, such as high cognitive load (e.g. handling two tasks simultaneously) or social stress (e.g. before giving a speech), or whether they are not characteristics of SAD at all. With the help of these findings, new interventions for the treatment of SAD can be developed, such as attentional bias modification or discrimination learning.}, subject = {Sozialangst}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Schulz2009, author = {Schulz, Stefan M.}, title = {Mediators of Social Anxiety - External Social Threat-Cues vs. Self-Related Negative Cognitions}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-44684}, school = {Universit{\"a}t W{\"u}rzburg}, year = {2009}, abstract = {Sozial {\"a}ngstliche Menschen richten ihre Aufmerksamkeit in sozial bedrohlichen Situationen nach innen auf selbstbezogene negative Gedanken (z.B. „Ich schaffe das nicht!"). Außerdem richten sie ihre Aufmerksamkeit unwillk{\"u}rlich bevorzugt auf potenziell bedrohliche soziale Umweltreize und beurteilen diese im Vergleich zu niedrig sozial {\"a}ngstlichen Kontrollpersonen besonders negativ. Einschl{\"a}gige Modelle und die Fachliteratur lassen den Schluss zu, dass selbstbezogene negative Gedanken und die systematisch verzerrte Verarbeitung bedrohlicher sozialer Umweltreize Mediatoren f{\"u}r Zusammenh{\"a}nge zwischen sozialer {\"A}ngstlichkeit und akuter Angst in sozial bedrohlichen Situationen sind. Zudem finden sich Hinweise auf Wechselwirkungen zwischen den angenommenen Mediatoren. Auf dieser Grundlage wurde ein Arbeitsmodell zu Mediatoren sozialer Angst erstellt. In drei Experimenten wurden von diesem Modell abgeleitete Hypothesen {\"u}berpr{\"u}ft. Die Ergebnisse der drei Experimente zeigten eindrucksvoll in subjektiven und physiologischen Daten (Herzratenvariabilit{\"a}t bzw. parasympathische Aktivierung), dass selbstbezogene negative Gedanken tats{\"a}chlich ein Mediator sozialer Angst sind. Im Vergleich dazu spielt die verzerrte automatische Verarbeitung bedrohlicher sozialer Umweltreize zumindest in {\"o}kologisch validen, sozial bedrohlichen Situationen eine vernachl{\"a}ssigbare Rolle.}, subject = {Sozialangst}, language = {en} }