Influences of social anxiety on neural responses to social threat stimuli during the attentional blink

• Applicant: Dr. Torge Dellert
• Subject Area: Biological Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 555343603

Social anxiety, the fear of social situations and negative evaluation by others, is associated with hypersensitivity to signals of social threat. Accordingly, neuroscientific research has demonstrated increased brain responses to angry versus neutral facial expressions, mainly involving early activity in brain areas related to the processing of faces and emotion. While theoretical accounts suggest potentiated threat processing even in the absence of awareness, little is known about the underlying neural mechanisms. Moreover, the processing of social threat sources other than facial expressions, such as learning experiences, is poorly understood. The aim of this project is to understand the spatiotemporal dynamics of neural responses to conscious and non-conscious face-related social threat signals and how these responses are modulated by interindividual differences in social anxiety. In three experiments, threatening and neutral face stimuli will be presented during the attentional blink, a method particularly sensitive to non-conscious processing due to its suppression of awareness at an attentional rather than sensory stage. The three studies will associate faces with social threat via 1) angry expressions, (2) contingency-based learning or (3) instructed knowledge, respectively. Stimulus awareness will be assessed using state-of-the-art trial-by-trial measures, and brain activity will be recorded using simultaneous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG), providing both high spatial and high temporal resolution. Subsequently, brain responses to threatening relative to neutral faces will be compared during conscious and non-conscious processing and correlated with individual social anxiety scores. Finally, these analyses will be complemented by single-trial EEG-informed fMRI. Taken together, the project aims to answer how non-conscious and conscious face stimuli associated with social threat are processed in the brain and how this processing is modulated by social anxiety and the source of threat-related information.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants