gap課題/overlap課題を用いた，社交不安における脅威刺激に対する注意解放困難の検討

抄録

While impaired attentional disengagement from threatening stimuli is thought to enhance anxiety, there are few studies focusing on this attentional bias in social anxiety. We used the gap task and overlap task to reveal the impaired attentional disengagement from threatening stimuli (angry and disgust faces) in socially anxious undergraduates. High (n=17) and low (n=13) socially anxious participants were asked to fixate on an emotional face (angry, disgust, or happy) or neutral face presented at the center of a screen, and discriminate the peripheral target stimulus. In the gap task, the face switched off and target appeared after the gap period. In the overlap task, the face was still on when the target stimulus appeared. The reaction times for angry faces in high socially anxious participants, compared with in low socially anxious, were longer than those for neutral faces after presentation times of 1000 ms in the overlap task. The results suggest that socially anxious people may have difficulty in disengagement from a socially threatening stimulus, and this occurs in the late part of information processing.