title: From face to hand: Attentional bias towards expressive hands in social anxiety.
abstract: The eye-region conveys important emotional information that we spontaneously attend to. Socially submissive individuals avoid other's gaze which is regarded as avoidance of others' emotional face expressions. But this interpretation ignores the fact that there are other sources of emotional information besides the face. Here we investigate whether gaze-aversion is associated with increased attention to emotional signals from the hands. We used eye-tracking to compare eye-fixations of pre-selected high and low socially anxious students when labeling bodily expressions (Experiment 1) with (non)-matching facial expressions (Experiment 2) and passively viewed (Experiment 3). High compared to low socially anxious individuals attended more to hand-regions. Our findings demonstrate that socially anxious individuals do attend to emotions, albeit to different signals than the eyes and the face. Our findings call for a closer investigation of alternative viewing patterns explaining gaze-avoidance and underscore that other signals besides the eyes and face must be considered to reach conclusions about social anxiety.
authors.affiliation: Leiden University, Institute of Psychology, The Cognitive Psychology Unit, The Netherlands; Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition (LIBC), The Netherlands. Electronic address: m.e.kret@fsw.leidenuniv.nl.
authors.forename: Mariska E
authors.initials: ME
authors.lastname: Kret
authors.affiliation: Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Cognitive Neuropsychology, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Jeroen J
authors.initials: JJ
authors.lastname: Stekelenburg
authors.affiliation: Cognitive Neuroscience, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Beatrice
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: de Gelder
authors.affiliation: Radboud University Nijmegen: Behavioural Science Institute & Donders Institute for Brain Cognition and Behaviour, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Karin
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Roelofs
mesh_terms: D000786:Anger; D000070379:Attentional Bias; D004644:Emotions; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D005403:Fixation, Ocular; D006225:Hand; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D009633:Nonverbal Communication; D000072861:Phobia, Social / Q000523:psychology*; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Body expressions; Emotion; Emotion recognition; Face expressions; Fixations; Hands; Social anxiety