TITLE:
Socially Anxious Tendencies Affect Autonomic Responses during Eye Gaze Perception
AUTHORS:
Yuki Tsuji, Sotaro Shimada
KEYWORDS:
Social Anxiety Disorder, Gaze Perception, Electrocardiogram (ECG), Heart Rate Deceleration
JOURNAL NAME:
Psychology,
Vol.6 No.13,
October
15,
2015
ABSTRACT: Social anxiety disorder is a common psychiatric disorder. The gaze of others is known to frequently induce social anxiety. We conducted a gaze detection experiment to examine the effects of social anxiety on autonomic response, namely heart rate (HR) response. We used the maximum HR deceleration between 0 s and 3 s after stimulus onset as an indicator of emotional stress. Participants were assigned to a high social anxiety (HSA) or low social anxiety (LSA) group on the basis of cut-off scores indicative of clinical levels of stress as per the Japanese version of the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (LSAS-J). Our results showed that HR deceleration was greater for the HSA compared with the LSA group. Moreover, the higher the LSAS-J score was, the greater the increase was in HR deceleration (correlation coefficient rs = 0.52, p