Attentional biases in social anxiety are widely researched with avoidance of negative facial expressions frequently reported. However, there is a limited amount of research focusing on attentional biases regarding individuals we had a negative interaction with. We aimed to find out how previous social exclusion the ability to find and inhibit different emotional expressions displayed by the excluding person, and how social anxiety influences this.
Participants (N=52) first completed a visual search task searching for various emotional expressions (happy, angry, fearful, or disgusted) among neutral faces. Then, they played a game of Cyberball in two different conditions: Control – the players made the same number of throws to the participant and each other, and Exclusion – one player excluded the participant. After the Cyberball game, participants repeated the visual search task. The familiar players from the game appeared either as targets or as distractors.
Participants found angry faces slower compared to happy, fearful and disgusted faces. Further, when comparing the pre- and post-game RTs, anxiety did not have an effect in the Control condition, while in the Exclusion condition, non-anxious individuals reacted faster compared to anxious individuals. This effect appeared both when the excluder was the target and the distractor. Our results support that angry faces are subject to an attentional avoidance. Furthermore, non-anxious individuals become more vigilant to emotional social cues after being excluded, while socially anxious individuals avoid the person that excluded them. Future studies need to confirm this using an eye-tracker.