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01-06-2009 | Basic Neurosciences, Genetics and Immunology - Original Article

Fear of negative evaluation and the hypervigilance-avoidance hypothesis: an eye-tracking study

Authors: Matthias J. Wieser, Paul Pauli, Peter Weyers, Georg W. Alpers, Andreas Mühlberger

Published in: Journal of Neural Transmission | Issue 6/2009

Abstract

The hypervigilance-avoidance hypothesis assumes that anxious individuals initially attend to and subsequently avoid threatening stimuli. In this study pairs of emotional (angry or happy) and neutral facial expressions were presented to students of high or low fear of negative evaluation (FNE) while their eye movements were recorded. High FNE participants initially looked more often at emotional compared to neutral faces, indicating an attentional bias for emotional facial expressions. This effect was further modulated by the sex of the face, as high FNE clearly showed a preference for happy female faces. Analysis of the time course of attention revealed that high FNE looked at the emotional faces longer during the first second of stimulus exposure, whereas they avoided these faces in the consecutive time interval from 1 to 1.5 s. These results partially support the hypervigilance-avoidance hypothesis and additionally indicate the relevance of happy faces for high FNE. Further research should clarify the meaning of happy facial expressions as well as the influence of the sex of the observed face in social anxiety.

As the low FNE group was significantly older than the high FNE group, all the analyses of eye movement data were repeated using age as a covariate. The findings from analyses of covariance (ANCOVAs) corroborated those from the ANOVAs by showing the same significant effects and interactions.

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Title: Fear of negative evaluation and the hypervigilance-avoidance hypothesis: an eye-tracking study
Authors: Matthias J. Wieser
Paul Pauli
Peter Weyers
Georg W. Alpers
Andreas Mühlberger
Publication date: 01-06-2009
Publisher: Springer Vienna
Published in: Journal of Neural Transmission / Issue 6/2009
Print ISSN: 0300-9564
Electronic ISSN: 1435-1463
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00702-008-0101-0

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Fear of negative evaluation and the hypervigilance-avoidance hypothesis: an eye-tracking study

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