The Intervention Effect of Attentional Training in Social Anxiety Individuals: An ERP Study

• Main Authors: Feng, Ya Chun, 馮雅群
• Other Authors: Hsu, Wen Yau
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/00072147053037122474

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 心理學研究所 === 102 === The aims of this study were two-fold. The first one was to examine the Attentional Training effect of directing attention to neutral or positive information. Also, the present study compared high and low social anxiety individuals’ attention process before and after the training, thereby exploring the training mechanism and the role of positive information in social anxiety individuals. In this study, there were 39 high social anxiety participants and 16 low social anxiety participants. The high social anxiety participants were assigned randomly into neutral training, positive training, and neutral control group; all of them completed eight Attentional Training sessions (twice a week). Before and after the training, participants were asked to complete five questionnaires and attention evaluation tasks with Event-Related Potentials (ERP). The five questionnaires were asked to complete three months after the training as a follow-up. The low social anxiety participants only filled out the five questionnaires and attention evaluation tasks with ERP without any training. The scores were compared with the ones from the high social anxiety participants. Three key findings were revealed after the questionnaires’ scores and ERP analysis. First, after the training, the Fear of Negative Evaluation Scale (FNE) scores were reduced in both neutral and positive training groups. This indicates that Attentional Training is effective. The face-evoked Early Directing Attention Negativity (EDAN) component shows that neutral and positive training groups would avoid threat faces after the training, which demonstrates the training mechanism is to avoid threat information. Second, from the information of face-evoked EDAN component, when neutral-positive face pairs were presented, positive faces are more attentive to the high social anxiety individuals than the low social anxiety individuals. In addition, compared to neutral faces, positive and threat faces were more attentive to high social anxiety individuals. This result reveals that the attention process difference between high and low social anxiety individuals was in the later stage of attention. Lastly, from the Fear of Positive Evaluation Scale (FPE) scores, high social anxiety individuals were afraid of positive evaluation more than low social anxiety individuals. From the ERP analysis, the way that high social anxiety individuals process the threat faces resembled the positive faces. Since the training effect is to avoid threat information, not attentive to positive information, there is no prove that social anxiety is due to less attentive to positive information. The third results supports that social anxiety individuals are afraid of positive evaluation. The value of the study is providing an effective intervention to reduce social anxiety, and exploring the intervention mechanism of the Attentional Training by ERP.