E-ISSN : 2733-4538
Social anxiety is an emotion characterized by the fear of other people’s negative evaluation and a fear of being observed. The purpose of this study was to investigate the cognitive bias of gaze perception in social anxiety and facial cluster stimulation. For 100 university students, the degrees of social anxiety and depression were measured using self-report questionnaires followed by conducting computer-based task through which participants repeated a series of trials to determine if eight people's eyes, presented over 500ms, were generally looking straight at them. The respective facial stimulations showed joy, anger, and a neutral emotion, and the front and side were presented in seven ratios (1:7, 2:6, 3:5, 4:4, 5:3, 6:2, 7:1). The responses were used to calculate a point of subjective equality (PSE) at which participants generally considered themselves to be looked at by others by a curve fitting a cumulative normal distribution function. A correlation analysis conducted to identify the relationship between the level of social anxiety and subjective equivalence showed a significant negative correlation between the two. This trend was maintained even when depression was statistically controlled. In particular, the correlation coefficient was greater for anger and neutral expressions, suggesting that the higher the level of social anxiety, the greater the tendency to judge others as looking at oneself, and that this tendency is more pronounced when the stimulus is neutral or angry.
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