Social anxiety modulates visual exploration in real life – but not in the laboratory

Abstract

In clinical reports, individuals high on social anxiety are often described to avoid gaze at other people, whereas several experimental studies employing images of persons yielded conflicting results. Here, we show that gaze avoidance crucially depends on the possibility of social interactions. We examined gaze behaviour in individuals with varying degrees of social anxiety in real‐life and in a second group of participants using a closely matched laboratory condition. In the real‐life situation, individuals with a higher degree of social anxiety had a reduced bias to look at near persons compared to individuals with a lower degree of social anxiety, while gaze behaviour in the laboratory group was not modulated by social anxiety. This effect was specific to social attention since there was no corresponding effect regarding fixations on objects. The presence of anxiety effects in real‐life but not in the laboratory condition, where participants do not expect to be evaluated by gazed‐at conspecifics, points to critical deficits of current laboratory research paradigms in eliciting authentic social attentional mechanisms, possibly leading to spurious results.

Looking behavior and potential human interactions during locomotion

“…Recent work on social anxiety corroborates this idea. Rubo, Huestegge, and Gamer (2020), for example, showed that social anxiety traits were negatively related to the percentage of fixations directed to persons at a near distance while walking through a train station. Thus, high socially anxious individuals tended to look less at other people at a near distance than low socially anxious individuals.…”

Social anxiety is associated with heart rate but not gaze behavior in a real social interaction

“…The pre-screening enabled us to include a wide spectrum of social anxiety manifestations in our sample. When planning the study, we aimed at examining approximately twice as many participants as in previous studies focusing on the influence of individual differences on gaze patterns in naturalistic situations (e.g., n = 26, Laidlaw et al, 2011 ; n = 32 Experiment 1, Freeth, Foulsham, & Kingstone, 2013 ; n = 26 Real-life group, Rubo et al, 2020 ; n = 36,; Vabalas & Freeth, 2016 ). In order to reach an approximately uniform distribution of social anxiety traits in our sample and since we expected a substantial number of dropouts due to recording problems or suspicion with our cover story, we initially invited 98 participants from more than 400 people who participated in a previous online screening on social anxiety traits (see Fig.…”

“…Of these, two studies used video recordings to infer gaze patterns ( Farabee et al, 1993 ; Langer et al, 2017 ) and the only study which actually recorded eye movements tested a webcam interaction design in only 20 participants ( Howell et al, 2016 ). Considering that viewing preferences of social features change from lab to real-world environments ( Foulsham et al, 2011 ; Hayward et al, 2017 ; Laidlaw et al, 2011 ; Rubo, Huestegge, & Gamer, 2019 ), it seems crucial to assess gaze behavior in socially anxious participants with adequate methodology during an actual social interaction. Since elevated skin conductance levels in social anxiety are primarily associated with real eye contact rather than the observation of photographed faces ( Myllyneva, Ranta, & Hietanen, 2015 ), an investigation of gaze and physiological responses in social anxiety towards different degrees of social interaction in a real-world setting will help to clarify the mechanisms underlying anxious behavior.…”

Stronger reactivity to social gaze in virtual reality compared to a classical laboratory environment

“…However, while several phenomena in the field of social cognition are typically investigated in real social situations (i.e., where a conspecific is physically present), gaze behaviour is often investigated in participants viewing images or videos of social situations. Interestingly, some studies measuring gaze allocation while other people were physically present found an avoidance of, instead of a preference for looking at them (Gallup, Chong, & Couzin, 2012; Laidlaw, Foulsham, Kuhn, & Kingstone, 2011), although other studies did not replicate this finding (Rubo, Huestegge, & Gamer, 2019). Furthermore, a recent study reported a modulation of social gaze in socially anxious persons, but only in a real‐life situation and not in a matched laboratory condition (Rubo et al ., 2019).…”