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Attention to Emotional Information in Social Anxiety Disorder With and Without Co-Occurring Depression

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Abstract

Despite the high comorbidity of Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) and Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), we know little about how persons with co-occurring SAD–MDD compare to their counterparts with pure disorders. In the present study we investigated attention to facial emotional stimuli in adult women with SAD only (n = 18), MDD only (n = 24), co-occurring SAD–MDD (n = 24), and healthy controls (CTL; n = 33). Participants were exposed to angry, sad, neutral, and happy faces for 200 and 1,000 ms as cues in a Posner attention task. We examined patterns of attentional engagement, disengagement, and vigilance-avoidance as a function of cue valence. Across the attentional indices, both the SAD and SAD–MDD groups differed most consistently from the MDD and CTL groups: they exhibited differential patterns of attention to angry, sad, and happy faces, including relatively greater vigilance-avoidance for angry faces. There was little evidence for any MDD-associated biases in attention. Findings suggest that the attentional processing of emotional information in SAD generally overrides the potential influence of co-occurring MDD. Implications for the understanding and treatment of co-occurring SAD–MDD are discussed.

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Notes

  1. The initial sample included 119 participants. We excluded 19 participants: 6 SAD participants scored above the BDI-II cutoff; 1 MDD participant scored below the BDI-II cutoff; 6 MDD participants scored above the SPAI SP subscale cutoff; 1 SAD-MDD participant scored below the BDI-II cutoff; and 5 CTL participants scored above the SPAI SP subscale cutoff.

  2. Supporting this possibility, in the present study the SAD group exhibited marginally greater vigilance-avoidance for neutral faces (M = 17.10) than did the CTL group (M = −4.98), p = .06.

  3. Importantly, we found that depressive symptom severity was not significantly associated with vigilance-avoidance for angry faces within the MDD group (BDI-II: r = −.13, p = .56; HRSD: r = .16, p = .47) or the SAD-MDD group (BDI-II: r = .20, p = .35; HRSD: r = .20, p = .36), or across the two groups (BDI-II: r = .11, p = .48; HRSD: r = .22, p = .13). In addition, participants in the MDD group and SAD-MDD group did not significantly differ in the number of past depressive episodes (MDD: M = 6.18; SAD-MDD: M = 4.38; p = .35) or the duration of the current episode in months (MDD: M = 8.98; SAD-MDD: M = 14.89; p = .32).

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Acknowledgments

We thank Dr. Ernst Koster for his assistance in developing the Posner task used in this study, and Juliana Gonzales, Kalpa Bhattacharjee, Arkadiy Maksimovskiy, and Maria Lemus for their help in data collection. This research was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health Grants MH080683 to Ian H. Gotlib and MH096385 to Katharina Kircanski.

Conflict of Interest

Katharina Kircanski, Jutta Joormann, Ian H. Gotlib declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Informed Consent

All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (national and institutional). Informed consent was obtained from all individual subjects participating in the study.

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No animal studies were carried out by the authors for this article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Jordan Hall, Building 420, Stanford, CA, 94305-2130, USA

    Katharina Kircanski & Ian H. Gotlib

  2. Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Jutta Joormann

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  1. Katharina Kircanski
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  2. Jutta Joormann
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  3. Ian H. Gotlib
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Correspondence to Katharina Kircanski.

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Kircanski, K., Joormann, J. & Gotlib, I.H. Attention to Emotional Information in Social Anxiety Disorder With and Without Co-Occurring Depression. Cogn Ther Res 39, 153–161 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-014-9643-7

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