Page 54 - Demo

Chapter 252analysis. Yet, independent of the probe location (congruent vs. incongruent), reaction times were faster with higher autistic trait levels for trials displaying an angry face, while they were slower for trials displaying a sad face. When zooming in on the attentional bias towards angry facial expressions, we found a significant interaction between autistic trait levels, social anxiety trait levels and congruency. This suggests that the link between the attentional bias to threat and the two trait dimensions might be more complex and require further exploration. Social Anxiety and the Attentional Bias to EmotionSurprisingly, an enhanced attentional bias to angry facial expression was not observed in people with higher levels of trait social anxiety. Possibly, the absence of this effect can be the result of the stimulus presentation duration that we employed in this study. According to a meta-analysis examining the link between social anxiety and the threat bias (Bantin et al., 2016a), shorter stimulus durations (< 200 ms) were associated with stronger biases. Nevertheless, attentional biases toward angry facial expressions could still be found at 500 ms and 600 ms presentation duration. Further, higher levels of social anxiety have not consistently been linked to stronger attentional biases toward angry facial expressions (Bantin et al., 2016a). A recent study in a healthy student sample reported that the half of individuals with higher social anxiety trait levels were found to have the lowest attentional bias whereas the other half was partially showing vigilance toward and partially avoidance of angry faces (Neophytou & Panayiotou, 2022). Crucially, even biases on the individual level were shown to be invariant, meaning that they change over time, and to depend on the assessment tool (MacLeod et al., 2019). The present study was the first to use a touchscreen to examine the association between social anxiety and the threat bias . Given the instability of attentional biases as well as , an interplay between various factors could explain not finding the expected effect. When comparing the effect of social anxiety traits on the threat bias at different autistic trait levels (three-way interaction), the attentional bias only seemed to be stronger with higher social anxiety traits at low autistic trait levels. This suggests that attentional biases in social anxiety might highly depend on additional individual characteristics. As a consequence, interventions focusing on treating maladaptive attentional biases, such as Attentional Bias Modification (ABM) training (MacLeod et al., 2002), might not be beneficial for every individual. Accordingly, ABM trainings