title: What does the facial dot-probe task tell us about attentional processes in social anxiety? A systematic review.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Current models of SAD assume that attentional processes play a pivotal role in the etiology and maintenance of social anxiety disorder. Social anxiety is supposedly associated with an attentional bias towards disorder related stimuli such as threatening faces. Using the facial dot probe task in socially anxious individuals has, however, revealed inconsistent findings.
  
  
  METHODS
  The current systematic review aims at disentangling the heterogeneous findings using effect sizes across results by systematically taking into account potential moderating variables (stimulus type, stimulus duration, situational anxiety, disorder severity).
  
  
  RESULTS
  Results provide some evidence that socially anxious individuals preferentially allocate their attention towards threat faces compared to non-anxious controls. This bias seems to depend on the type of reference stimulus, stimulus duration and clinical level of social anxiety. Avoidance of threat was neither found at early, nor at later stages of attentional processing.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Importantly, the results have to be considered in the light of the only few studies available. Given the heterogeneity of results and some methodological restrictions of the studies included, the picture of attentional bias seems to be much less clear than suggested in the recent social anxiety literature.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Methodologically, combined measures of dot-probe and eye movement measures might be beneficial to detect overt attentional biases. Importantly, our results show that preferential processing of threat cues might guide early attentional processes in social anxiety, depending however on several contextual and situational factors. Clinically, patients with greater severity of SAD may be more prone to such an attentional bias, thus therapists should take this into account when planning behavioral experiments and exposure therapy.
authors.affiliation: Department of Clinical Psychology, Justus Liebig University Giessen, Otto-Behaghel-Str. 10F, 35394 Giessen, Germany.
authors.forename: Trisha
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Bantin
authors.affiliation: Department of Clinical Psychology, Justus Liebig University Giessen, Otto-Behaghel-Str. 10F, 35394 Giessen, Germany; Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, University of Cologne, Pohligstraße 1, 50969 Cologne, Germany. Electronic address: stephan.stevens@uni-koeln.de.
authors.forename: Stephan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Stevens
authors.affiliation: Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy, University of Cologne, Pohligstraße 1, 50969 Cologne, Germany.
authors.forename: Alexander L
authors.initials: AL
authors.lastname: Gerlach
authors.affiliation: Department of Clinical Psychology, Justus Liebig University Giessen, Otto-Behaghel-Str. 10F, 35394 Giessen, Germany.
authors.forename: Christiane
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Hermann
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D000066499:Facial Recognition / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D010698:Phobic Disorders / Q000503:physiopathology*; D012938:Social Perception
keywords: Attentional bias; Dot probe; Social anxiety disorder; Systematic review; Vigilance for threat