Journal
PSYCHIATRY RESEARCH
Volume 228, Issue 1, Pages 136-142Publisher
ELSEVIER IRELAND LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.psychres.2015.04.030
Keywords
Social anxiety; Attentional Network Functioning; Attentional Network Task; Visuo-spatial Attention; Anxiety
Categories
Funding
- Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.-FNRS, Belgium)
- Belgian Foundation Vocatio
- Belgian French Community Grant for Scientific Excellence
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People with social anxiety disorder (SAD) exhibit an attentional bias for threat (AB). Nevertheless, the focus on AB for emotional stimuli has led to neglect the exploration of basic attention deficits for non-emotional material among SAD patients. This study aimed to investigate the integrity of the attentional system in SAD. The Attention Network Test was used to precisely explore attentional deficits, and centrally the differential deficit across the three attentional networks, namely alerting (allowing to achieve and maintain a state of alertness), orienting (allowing to select information from sensory input by engaging or disengaging attention to one stimulus among others and/or shifting the attentional resources from one stimulation to another), and executive control (involving the top-down control of attention and allowing to resolve response conflicts). Twenty-five patients with SAD were compared to 25 matched controls. SAD patients exhibited a specific impairment for the orienting network (p < 0.001) but preserved performance for the alerting and executive networks. Complementary analyses revealed that this impairment may result from a faster attentional engagement to task-irrelevant material. The orienting impairment was highly correlated with the intensity of the social anxiety symptoms, but did not correlate either with trait-anxiety, state-anxiety, or depressive symptoms. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.
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