A surprising method for reducing social anxiety has been found

Scientists from China have discovered that specialized working memory training can change the automatic attention response in people with high social anxiety - they stopped quickly fixating on threatening faces. The work is published in the Journal of Affective Disorders (JAD).

Social anxiety manifests not only in feelings but also in how a person observes their surroundings. For such people, any glance that seems unfriendly to them is perceived as a potential threat, causing them to constantly "scan" faces around them for criticism or disapproval. This effect is called attentional bias - the automatic highlighting of threatening stimuli in the visual field.

In the new study, a team led by Huang Zhang from Northwest Normal University set out to test whether this automatic reaction could be changed through working memory tasks if they included emotional stimuli. Previously, similar training used only neutral forms, such as numbers or shapes, and rarely addressed the emotional sphere.

First, the scientists recorded the eye movements of 69 students during an experimental task where participants were shown a pair of faces - one with a neutral expression, the other angry or happy. Students with high anxiety were much more likely to instantly look at angry expressions and hold their gaze on them longer than their less anxious peers.

Then 58 anxious participants underwent a month-long working memory training program. One group performed standard exercises, while the second group completed an emotional version of the task, where they had to memorize emotional faces and words. After 20 sessions, those who worked with emotional stimuli became less likely to look at angry faces first during retesting.

According to the authors, the results of the study give hope for the development of computer methods for treating psychological characteristics associated with anxiety.