Study: Social Anxiety Predicts Enhanced Electrocortical Sensitivity to the Mental State Meanings Revealed by Gaze Patterns (DOI: 10.1111/psyp.70409)
Ever catch someone looking your way and wonder what they're thinking? For people with social anxiety, that moment may trigger a heightened response in the brain, even though it does not improve their later judgments about what the gaze means.
A new University of Michigan study found that young adults with higher levels of social anxiety showed stronger brain responses when a word describing someone's thoughts or feelings didn't match what their gaze seemed to convey.
The federally funded research, which appears in the journal Psychophysiology, offers a new perspective on social anxiety, which is often viewed mainly as a source of distress.
Being especially alert to social cues could help people notice potentially important signals about others, but it could also leave them more prone to worry about what others think of them, said the study's first author, Irene Melani, who recently received doctorate in psychology from U-M and is now a postdoctoral fellow at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Melani and colleagues studied young adults with varying levels of social anxiety. While their brain activity was recorded using electroencephalography, participants viewed different gaze patterns followed by words describing mental states. Some words matched the meaning typically associated with the gaze; others did not.
People with higher social anxiety showed a stronger brain response when the gaze and the word didn't match, Melani said. This response, known as the N400, occurs when the brain encounters information that conflicts with an expected meaning.
The pattern did not appear in a comparison task involving animal stereotypes, suggesting that the heightened response was specific to interpreting what other people might be thinking or feeling-not simply to noticing mismatched information.
But there was a catch: People with higher social anxiety were no better at later explicitly judging what someone's gaze meant. They were neither more accurate nor faster than participants with lower social anxiety.
"People higher in social anxiety showed greater neural sensitivity to the meaning conveyed by the gaze, but this advantage was not apparent in their later judgments," she said. "One possibility is that this initial neural sensitivity may place additional demands on their thinking, potentially contributing to excessive monitoring or rumination that obscures the earlier advantage."
The researchers say this heightened sensitivity could have both benefits and drawbacks, depending on the situation. Paying close attention to social cues might help people recognize others' intentions or anticipate social risks. But the same vigilance could also make everyday interactions more stressful, encouraging people to dwell on what others might think or mean, Melani said.
The study did not establish whether this sensitivity helps people navigate real-world social situations. However, in a related ongoing study, the authors found that social anxiety predicted lower biological health risk in Japan, where social norms are more strongly enforced, but not in the United States, where norms are relatively more relaxed.
Together, the findings raise the possibility that social anxiety may not always be a liability. Instead, its consequences may depend on the context in which it operates.
The research was supported by the National Science Foundation (grants BCS-0717982 and SES-1325881). U-M psychology professor Shinobu Kitayama, director of the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the Institute for Social Research, was the senior author.
