Facial expressions and eye tracking in individuals with social anxiety disorder: a systematic review

Abstract

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is characterized by the fear of being judged negatively in social situations. Eye-tracking techniques have been prominent among the methods used in recent decades to investigate emotional processing in SAD. This study offers a systematic review of studies on eye-tracking patterns in individuals with SAD and controls in facial emotion recognition tasks. Thirteen articles were selected from the consulted databases. It was observed that the subjects with SAD exhibited hypervigilance-avoidance in response to emotions, primarily in the case of negative expressions. There was avoidance of conspicuous areas of the face, particularly the eyes, during observations of negative expressions. However, this hypervigilance did not occur if the stimulus was presented in virtual reality. An important limitation of these studies is that they use only static expressions, which can reduce the ecological validity of the results.