Abstract:

Abundant studies have explored the processing of emotional faces for high social anxiety participants and intervention work of social anxiety in recent years. Although there are rich findings, some limitations need to be considered. There are fewer types of emotion, dimensions of videos, and durations of videos in the previous dynamic emotional faces in Chinese. Furthermore, recognition of dynamic emotional faces for neural mechanisms in high social anxiety participants has not been examined systematically. The final limitation is that there are controversies on attentional bias training. More specifically, some researchers reported the effects of attentional bias training on participants’ social anxiety while others did not detect such effects.
To address these limitations, our dynamic emotional faces in Chinese will enrich types of emotion, dimensions of videos, and durations of videos. Then recognition of dynamic emotional faces for neural mechanisms in high social anxiety participants should be investigated systematically by techniques of neuroscience. Finally, we will employ a working memory training to improve attentional biases of the recognition of dynamic angry faces in high social anxiety participants. We propose a model of the neural mechanism for the recognition of dynamic emotional faces in participants with high social anxiety, which consists of a mechanism and intervention sub-model. Our studies provide a new perspective for the research of processing of dynamic emotional faces and social anxiety. In addition, these studies included three research method (behavioral, electrophysiological and brain imaging method). In sum, our findings contribute to the intervention work of social anxiety, decrease psychological health problems in high social anxiety participants, and ultimately decrease their happiness and quality of life.

Key words: social anxiety, dynamic faces, emotion, attentional bias, working memory training, ERP and fMRI