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Engaging in social interaction often implies being evaluated. Receiving positive evaluations from others may elicit affiliative emotions whereas negative evaluations are likely to trigger withdrawal and defensive social behavior. Evolution has equipped humans with efficient systems to detect, appraise, and regulate responses to such evaluative communications and to express complementary responses. The current study investigates neural, facial-muscular, and experiential responses to short videos delivering neutral, positive, and negative audiovisual messages as well as their relation to individual differences in social anxiety. Fifty-eight participants (32 female) watched 90 videos with male and female actors displaying positive, negative, and neutral statements. Experientially, ratings of valence and arousal showed the expected category differences. Neurally, larger centro-parietal late positive event related potentials were found for emotional (positive and negative) videos compared to neutral videos. Facial electromyography revealed reduced corrugator muscle and increased zygomaticus major muscle activity for positive videos compared to neutral and negative videos. Cognitive components of social anxiety were related to a more unpleasant experience of negative videos and a less pleasant experience of positive videos. Thus, a set of neural, facial-muscular, and experiential responses contribute to social interaction in the context of relatively naturalistic social-evaluative stimuli., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Psychometric studies indicate that anxiety sensitivity (AS) is a risk factor for anxiety disorders such as panic disorder (PD). To better understand the psychophysiological basis of AS and its relation to clinical anxiety, we examined whether high-AS individuals show similarly elevated reactivity to inhalations of carbon dioxide (CO2) as previously reported for PD and social phobia in this task. Healthy individuals with high and low AS were exposed to eight standardized inhalations of 20% CO2-enriched air, preceded and followed by inhalations of room air. Anxiety and dyspnea, in addition to autonomic and respiratory responses were measured every 15 s. Throughout the task, high AS participants showed a respiratory pattern of faster, shallower breathing and reduced inhalation of CO2 indicative of anticipatory or contextual anxiety. In addition, they showed elevated dyspnea responses to the second set of air inhalations accompanied by elevated heart rate, which could be due to sensitization or conditioning. Respiratory abnormalities seem to be common to high AS individuals and PD patients when considering previous findings with this task. Similarly, sensitization or conditioning of anxious and dyspneic symptoms might be common to high AS and clinical anxiety. Respiratory conditionability deserves greater attention in anxiety disorder research., (Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Previous research on autonomic characteristics of social anxiety in children and adolescents has produced highly inconsistent results which may partially be due to task differences and a limited breadth of autonomic measurement. Here we investigated a sample of high (HSA) and low socially anxious (LSA) children, aged 10-12 years before, during and after a standardized evaluated speech task while acquiring a broad set of autonomic and experiential measures. During baseline, we found evidence for tonically higher sympathetic autonomic activity in HSA children, indicated by higher low frequency heart rate variability (LF) and a trend for higher LF to high frequency heart rate variability ratios (LF/HF). In response to the speech task, HSA children showed blunted cardiac responding evidenced by slower increase and delayed recovery of heart rate and a similar significant trend on LF/HF values. Self-reported anxiety, by contrast, showed enhanced reactivity from baseline to anticipation in the HSA compared to the LSA group. The results suggest a restricted cardiac flexibility in HSA children and illustrate that broad autonomic assessment during a well-structured, naturalistic task may improve our understanding of the autonomic physiology of socially anxious children. The results have implications for current theories of social anxiety.

Background and Objectives: Previous research has found that in some contexts, suppression increases distress, whereas acceptance decreases distress. It is not clear, however, whether these two common forms of emotion regulation have comparable or divergent physiological and behavioral effects during the anticipation and receipt of a painful stimulus., Methods: To address this issue, we randomized participants to suppression, acceptance, or no instruction control groups, and assessed their cardiovascular and behavioral responses while they anticipated and then received electric shocks., Results: Findings revealed that compared to the control condition (1) acceptance and suppression led to comparable reductions in pain reports and cardiac defense responses; and (2) acceptance led to greater reductions in reports of anticipatory anxiety than suppression., Limitations: The current study tested only two emotion regulation techniques in the context of a pain-inducing stimulus that has limited ecological validity., Conclusions: In contrast to previous research, we found that both acceptance and suppression are effective in reducing pain and anxiety in response to experimentally induced pain., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Social anxiety is associated with an attentional bias toward angry and fearful faces, along with an enhanced processing of faces per se. However, little is known about the processing of gaze direction, a subtle but important social cue. Participants with high or low social anxiety (HSA/LSA) observed eye pairs with direct or averted gaze while subjective ratings and event-related potentials (ERPs) were measured. Behaviorally, all participants rated averted gaze as more unpleasant than direct gaze. Neurally, only HSA participants showed a trend for higher P100 amplitudes to averted gaze and significantly enhanced processing at late latencies (Late positive potential [LPP]), indicative of a specific processing bias for averted gaze. Furthermore, HSA individuals showed enhanced processing of both direct and averted gaze relative to the LSA group at intermediate latencies (Early posterior negativity [EPN]). Both general and specific attentional biases play a role in social anxiety. Averted gaze--potential sign of disinterest--deserves more attention in the attentional bias literature., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Recent studies have begun to carve out a specific role for the rostral part of the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) and adjacent dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) in fear/anxiety. Within a novel general framework of dorsal mPFC/ACC areas subserving the appraisal of threat and concomitant expression of fear responses and ventral mPFC/ACC areas subserving fear regulation, the rostral dmPFC/dACC has been proposed to specifically mediate the conscious, negative appraisal of threat situations including, as an extreme variant, catastrophizing. An alternative explanation that has not been conclusively ruled out yet is that the area is involved in fear learning. We tested two different fear expression paradigms in separate fMRI studies (study 1: instructed fear, study 2: testing of Pavlovian conditioned fear) with independent groups of healthy adult subjects. In both paradigms the absence of reinforcement precluded conditioning. We demonstrate significant BOLD activation of an identical rostral dmPFC/dACC area. In the Pavlovian paradigm (study 2), the area only activated robustly once prior conditioning had finished. Thus, our data argue against a role of the area in fear learning. We further replicate a repeated observation of a dissociation between peripheral-physiological fear responding and rostral dmPFC/dACC activation, strongly suggesting the area does not directly generate fear responses but rather contributes to appraisal processes. Although we succeeded in preventing extinction of conditioned responding in either paradigm, the data do not allow us to definitively exclude an involvement of the area in fear extinction learning. We discuss the broader implications of this finding for our understanding of mPFC/ACC function in fear and in negative emotion more generally.

Cognitive models of social phobia (SP) and empirical evidence in adults suggest that affected individuals overestimate arousal symptoms such as heart rate (HR) during social stress and worry about their visibility in public. To date, little is known about these aspects in childhood social anxiety, an important precursor of the disorder. We assessed perception of--and worry about--HR visibility, actual HR, and subjective anxiety during public speaking in high socially anxious (HSA; n = 20) and low socially anxious (LSA; n = 20) Caucasian children, aged 10 to 12 years. Symptom visibility was manipulated by making a nonveridical HR feedback tone audible only to the participant (private condition, HR sounds via headphone) or to participant and observers (public condition, HR sounds via speakers). Further, we assessed interoceptive accuracy in a heartbeat counting task. As expected, HSA children perceived their HR as higher than LSA children in both private and public conditions despite similar actual HR and comparable interoceptive accuracy. Public feedback led to more worry about HR visibility only in HSA but not in LSA children. Biased perception and interpretation of bodily anxiety symptoms during social stress manifests early in social anxiety and might therefore play a crucial role in the aggravation of social anxiety and the development of SP. We discuss implications for current theory, clinical practice, and prevention.

Objective: Fear conditionability has been found to be elevated in samples with high trait anxiety or anxiety disorders. Since these studies provide circumstantial evidence for a causal link between anxiety and conditionability we examined fear conditionability after experimental induction of anxiety in two experiments., Method: In Experiment 1, 60 participants were randomized to one of two film conditions inducing an anxious or happy emotional state. They subsequently underwent a differential conditioning acquisition procedure. Two pictures of faces served as conditioned stimuli (CS+ and CS-), and an electric stimulus served as aversive unconditioned stimulus (US). In Experiment 2, after similar acquisition procedure as used in Experiment 1, 90 participants watched one of three films (anxious, neutral, happy) prior to an extinction procedure. In both studies, skin conductance response (SCR) served as measure of fearful responding., Results: Conditioning was successful in both studies. In Experiment 1, the anxious group exhibited decreased SCRs to both CS+ and CS- during acquisition. In Experiment 2, during extinction SCRs to both CSs were highest in the anxious group, intermediate in the neutral, and lowest in the happy group., Discussion: State anxiety did not enhance conditionability during acquisition or reduce the extinction procedure. However, individuals in an anxious state show less responding during fear learning, but more responding during unlearning. Thus, our results suggest that state anxiety changes the sensitivity with which individuals react to stimuli presented in different contexts., (Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Twenty-five panic disorder (PD) patients, 19 social phobics (SP), and 20 healthy controls (HC) sat quietly for 15 min, rating their anxiety and dyspnea every 30s while respiratory, cardiovascular, and electrodermal responses were recorded. No panic attacks were reported. For self-reported anxiety and dyspnea, within-subject variability over time was higher in PD than in SP or HC. In PD within-subject correlations across 30-s epochs were significant for (a) self-reported anxiety versus dyspnea, end-tidal pCO2, minute volume, duty cycle, skin conductance level, and interbeat interval, and for (b) dyspnea versus end-tidal pCO2, minute volume, tidal volume, and inspiratory flow rate. Several positive or negative correlations were greater in PD than in other groups. Thus in PD, experienced anxiety and dyspnea are temporally unstable but are correlated with each other and with fluctuations in respiratory and autonomic variables, even in the absence of panic attacks., (Copyright © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Inhalation of carbon dioxide (CO₂) enriched air triggers anxiety in panic disorder (PD) patients, which is often interpreted as a sign of biological vulnerability. However, most studies have not measured respiration in these tasks. We compared patients with PD (n=20) and social phobia (SP, n=19) to healthy controls (n=18) during eight inhalations of 20% CO₂, preceded and followed by two inhalations of room air, while continuously measuring subjective anxiety and dyspnea as well as autonomic and respiratory variables. PD patients showed increased reactivity and delayed recovery during CO₂ inhalations for most measures. Unlike both other groups, the PD group's tidal volume responses did not habituate across CO₂ inhalations. However, PD patients did not differ from SP patients on most other measures, supporting a continuum model of CO₂ sensitivity across anxiety disorders. Both patient groups showed continued reactivity during the last air inhalations, which is unlikely to be due to a biological sensitivity., (Copyright © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Advances in biosignal acquisition and processing have provided an effective window to the complex peripheral physiology related to human emotions. Numerous cardiovascular measures have been used for assessing the activity of the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system. More recently, respiratory parameters have shown promise for the assessment of anxiety. Current theoretical accounts of anxiety recommend a broad assessment of anxiety responses involving measures from the physiological, behavioral and verbal-cognitive domain. However, practical and statistical considerations put restrictions on the number of dependent variables used in studies on emotion. In a laboratory experiment we assessed a large number of psychophysiological parameters to identify their relative utility for differentiating between a neutral (quiet sitting) and an anxious state induced by threat of shock. High effect sizes were found in all psychophysiological systems with electrodermal and behavioral responses demonstrating the highest, and respiratory and cardiovascular responses yielding medium and small effect sizes. A linear combination of the six most powerful variables was highly significant in distinguishing the neutral from the anxious state and resulted in 83.3% correct classification. Results demonstrate the necessity to include measures from multiple response domains for an adequate assessment of anxiety states. Furthermore, our results point to the significance of respiratory parameters in anxiety assessment.