Author ORCID Identifier:
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8840-8734
Date of Graduation
9-2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts in Psychology (MA)
Degree Level
Graduate
Department
Psychological Science
Advisor/Mentor
Judah, Matt
Committee Member
Grant Shields
Third Committee Member
Jessica Fugitt
Keywords
Attention; Eye Tracking; Social Anxiety; Trait Anxiety; Visual Attention
Abstract
Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is associated with significant functional impairment and low remission rates, even at subclinical levels. Selective attention to social threat, or attentional bias, has been proposed as a cognitive mechanism contributing to the development and maintenance of SAD. However, decades of research have produced mixed findings, and attempts to modify attentional bias have yielded modest treatment effects. One reason for these inconsistencies may be that traditional models of attentional bias have focused primarily on early, automatic capture of threat. In contrast, emerging work in visual cognition emphasizes the role of proactive attentional suppression, such as the signal suppression hypothesis, according to which even salient stimuli may be inhibited in early stages of visual processing, before they capture attention. The current study extends the signal suppression hypothesis to socially threatening stimuli and tests whether anxiety symptoms disrupt this form of proactive attentional control. 48 undergraduate participants completed an eye-tracking task involving an adaptation of the additional singleton paradigm, in which either an angry or a neutral face appeared as a singleton distractor in an array of otherwise all-angry or all-neutral faces. Participants were instructed to report the orientation of a gradient inside a predefined target shape. First saccade destination and manual reaction time were recorded as indices of attentional capture or suppression. At the group level, results provided strong support for the signal suppression hypothesis. First saccades were significantly more likely to land on nonsingleton distractors than singleton distractors, and response times were faster on singleton-present trials, suggesting that salient, task-irrelevant stimuli were proactively suppressed regardless of emotional context. However, linear mixed-effects models, which are more sensitive to individual differences, revealed that anxiety symptoms moderated these effects. Contrary to hypotheses, social anxiety symptoms did not significantly predict oculomotor capture, although a trend-level interaction was observed. Trait cognitive anxiety emerged as the strongest and only significant predictor of increased oculomotor capture of angry distractors, indicating reduced suppression efficiency under conditions of emotional salience. In contrast, reaction time analyses were largely nonsignificant. These findings advance mechanistic accounts of attentional bias by demonstrating that proactive suppression, and not just stimulus-driven capture, plays a central role in visual attention to social threat. The specific effect of trait cognitive anxiety underscores the importance of anticipatory processing and goal-directed inhibition as targets for future theoretical models. Moreover, the discrepancy between oculomotor and reaction time findings suggests that early-stage attentional disruptions may go undetected in traditional behavioral tasks, highlighting the value of eye-tracking methods. Taken together, this study contributes to a more nuanced framework for understanding anxiety-related attentional control and offers a foundation for future work integrating the study of anxiety with contemporary theories of visual cognition.
Citation
Hamrick, H. C. (2025). Strange Things, Moving Things, Wild Animals: Attentional Capture and Suppression of Threat in Social Anxiety. Graduate Theses and Dissertations Retrieved from https://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/5837
