Journal
NEUROIMAGE
Volume 54, Issue 2, Pages 1615-1624Publisher
ACADEMIC PRESS INC ELSEVIER SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2010.08.080
Keywords
Steady-state; EEG; Social anxiety; Faces; KDEF; Facial expressions; Social phobia
Funding
- National Institute of Mental Health [P50 MH 72850]
- Andreas Keil at the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL [R01 MH084932]
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Heightened perception of facial cues is at the core of many theories of social behavior and its disorders. In the present study, we continuously measured electrocortical dynamics in human visual cortex, as evoked by happy, neutral, fearful, and angry faces. Thirty-seven participants endorsing high versus low generalized social anxiety (upper and lower tertiles of 2104 screened undergraduates) viewed naturalistic faces flickering at 17.5 Hz to evoke steady-state visual evoked potentials (ssVEPs), recorded from 129 scalp electrodes. Electrophysiological data were evaluated in the time-frequency domain after linear source space projection using the minimum norm method. Source estimation indicated an early visual cortical origin of the face-evoked ssVEP, which showed sustained amplitude enhancement for emotional expressions specifically in individuals with pervasive social anxiety. Participants in the low symptom group showed no such sensitivity, and a correlational analysis across the entire sample revealed a strong relationship between self-reported interpersonal anxiety/avoidance and enhanced visual cortical response amplitude for emotional, versus neutral expressions. This pattern was maintained across the 3500 ms viewing epoch, suggesting that temporally sustained, heightened perceptual bias towards affective facial cues is associated with generalized social anxiety. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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