Author(s)

Yuki Tsuji¹, Sotaro Shimada^2*

¹Department of Electrical Engineering, Graduate School of Science and Technology, Meiji University, Kawasaki, Japan.
²Department of Electronics and Bioinformatics, School of Science and Technology, Meiji University, Kawasaki, Japan.

Social anxiety disorder is a common psychiatric disorder. The gaze of others is known to frequently induce social anxiety. We conducted a gaze detection experiment to examine the effects of social anxiety on autonomic response, namely heart rate (HR) response. We used the maximum HR deceleration between 0 s and 3 s after stimulus onset as an indicator of emotional stress. Participants were assigned to a high social anxiety (HSA) or low social anxiety (LSA) group on the basis of cut-off scores indicative of clinical levels of stress as per the Japanese version of the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (LSAS-J). Our results showed that HR deceleration was greater for the HSA compared with the LSA group. Moreover, the higher the LSAS-J score was, the greater the increase was in HR deceleration (correlation coefficient r_s = 0.52, p < 0.01). Our results suggest that the eye gaze of others can be processed as a threat in individuals with a high tendency towards social anxiety.

Social Anxiety Disorder, Gaze Perception, Electrocardiogram (ECG), Heart Rate Deceleration

Tsuji, Y. and Shimada, S. (2015) Socially Anxious Tendencies Affect Autonomic Responses during Eye Gaze Perception. Psychology, 6, 1649-1652. doi: 10.4236/psych.2015.613160.