Scary in the eye of the beholder: Attentional bias and attentional retraining for social anxiety

Consistent with cognitive models of social anxiety, socially anxious individuals show cognitive biases that magnify their perceived level of threat in the environment. The first objective was to determine whether attentional bias for socially threatening stimuli occurs after concomitant depression has been controlled. The second objective was to test the effectiveness of the Attention Control Training Program for Social Anxiety (ACTP-SA) for reducing social anxiety attentional bias and improving therapeutic indices in people with social anxiety. In the first study, socially anxious (N = 30) and non-anxious individuals (N = 30) completed the Beck Depression Inventory-II, Spielberger's State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, Conner's Social Phobia Inventory, a social-anxiety Stroop test, and a clinical interview. In the second study, individuals with social anxiety (N = 30) were randomly assigned to an experimental group that received 4 sessions of ACTP-SA, or to a sham-intervention control condition. At the post-test and a 3-month follow-up, both groups completed the same measures as in Study 1. In Study 1, socially anxious individuals showed higher attentional bias for threatening stimuli than the controls, after depression had been controlled for. In Study 2, participants in the experimental group, compared with the controls, showed greater reductions in attentional bias, social anxiety, and trait anxiety at post-test and follow-up. The results underscore the importance of information processing biases in social anxiety and the benefits of attentional bias training as a complementary intervention for modifying symptoms of social anxiety. •Social Anxiety Attentional Bias (AB) is independent of depression and rumination.•We tested the effectiveness of an attention re-training program to reduce social anxiety AB and the social anxiety symptoms.•Participants trained with SA-ACTP reduced their social anxiety AB, social anxiety, and trait anxiety.•We suggest that SA-ACTP can be used as a complementary intervention in the treatment of social anxiety.