ABSTRACT

Socially anxious people have a malfunction in attentional systems. However, it is uncertain whether the malfunction of the attentional system is a domain-specific process to social stimuli or a domain-general process to non-social stimuli. Therefore, we investigated the effects of social anxiety on the domain specificity of the attentional process using a spatial Stroop paradigm. We conducted two identical experiments with a total of 153 university students including men and women (61 students in Experiment 1 and 92 students in Experiment 2), in which the levels of social anxiety were assessed using specific instruments. The results showed that social anxiety scores were negatively correlated with the reversed spatial Stroop effect for social stimuli, but not for non-social stimuli (Experiment 1). The findings of the first experiment were successfully replicated in Experiment 2. Our results suggested that the malfunction of the attentional system is a domain-specific process to socially threatening stimuli in socially anxious individuals.

摘要

社交焦虑的人在注意力系统上有故障。然而，注意力系统的故障是对社会刺激的特定领域过程还是对非社会刺激的领域一般过程尚不确定。因此，我们使用空间 Stroop 范式研究了社交焦虑对注意过程领域特异性的影响。我们对包括男性和女性在内的 153 名大学生（实验 1 中的 61 名学生和实验 2 中的 92 名学生）进行了两个相同的实验，其中使用特定工具评估社交焦虑水平。结果表明，社交焦虑评分与社交刺激的反向空间 Stroop 效应呈负相关，但与非社交刺激无关（实验 1）。