Anxiety and the neural processing of threat in faces

Abstract

This study examined the relationship between social anxiety and the neural processing of threat in faces. Twenty-one adults with different levels of society anxiety were tested for their event-related potential responses to unattended threatening and nonthreatening faces, presented upright and upside-down, at three points in time: 160-210 ms (vertex positive potential), 300-350 ms (N3) and 440-500 ms (P3). Social anxiety was significantly correlated with the size of P3 to upright angry faces but not happy faces. This supports the theory that anxiety diverts attention towards goal-irrelevant threat cues, and suggests that this threat-related shift in attention starts to affect the processing of faces at 440-500 ms.