An Unexpected Way to Overcome Social Anxiety

Revolutionary approach: Chinese scientists have learned to "reprogram" attention in social anxiety

Researchers from China have made a breakthrough in combating social anxiety by discovering that special working memory training can change the automatic attention response in anxious individuals. After a course of training, participants stopped involuntarily fixing their gaze on threatening faces. The results of this promising research have been published in the prestigious scientific journal Journal of Affective Disorders (JAD).

People with social anxiety perceive the world in a special way — they continuously scan surrounding faces, looking for signs of disapproval or criticism. Any unfriendly look is instantly perceived by them as a threat. This phenomenon, known as "attention bias," causes the brain to automatically highlight potentially dangerous stimuli in the field of vision.

A team led by Huang Zhang from Northwestern Normal University decided to test an innovative hypothesis: whether this automatic reaction could be changed through specialized working memory exercises with emotional stimuli. Previously, similar training included only neutral objects — numbers or geometric shapes, barely addressing the emotional sphere.

In the initial stage, scientists recorded the eye movements of 69 students during an experiment where participants were shown pairs of faces — one with a neutral expression, the other with an angry or happy expression. The results were indicative: students with high anxiety were much more likely to instantly pay attention to angry expressions and held their gaze on them longer than their less anxious peers.

Then 58 anxious participants underwent an intensive month-long working memory training program. The first group performed standard exercises, while the second group completed an emotional version of tasks requiring memorization of emotional faces and words. After 20 training sessions, the results were impressive: those who worked with emotional stimuli became significantly less likely to look at angry faces first during retesting.

According to the researchers, the results obtained open promising prospects for the development of computer-based methods for treating psychological characteristics associated with anxiety disorders.