2 - (OP12) Relevance of Attentional Biases to Real-world Behaviours and Experiences in Social Anxiety Disorder

Cognitive models of social anxiety propose that attentional biases for social threat play a role in the development and persistence of social anxiety. Empirical findings suggest that socially anxious individuals may exhibit both orienting biases towards social threat and later avoidance biases away from threat relative to healthy control individuals based on laboratory paradigms. However, these laboratory measures of attentional bias in social anxiety often do not demonstrate strong ecological validity, whether in terms of the types of stimuli that are presented or in terms of how they are associated with real-world behaviors and experiences. This individual talk will present results from our team’s work examining how attentional biases for threat manifest on more naturalistic measures of attentional bias and predict real world behavior after a brief follow-up period. In one study of community individuals ranging in social anxiety symptom severity (N = 45), we found that greater fixation on threat stimuli was associated with more avoidance behaviours and stronger avoidance of threat stimuli was associated with lower self-reported social interaction frequency over a one week follow-up period. In another study, we found that relative to healthy control individuals, individuals with Social Anxiety Disorder exhibit biased attention towards negative self-relevant evaluative content from an in-lab social dyad interaction task. Our findings highlight how attentional biases for threatening stimuli may manifest in the real world. Future directions for research and implications for clinical interventions, both psychotherapeutic and computerized cognitive trainings, will be discussed.