Abstract: social anxiety disorder is the obvious and continuous fear of one or more social situations and manifests itself as the attentional bias to social stimuli, which includes facilitated attention, difficulty in disengaging, attentional avoidance, the three components that interact with each other and sustain the development of social anxiety. Currently, several paradigms involving dot-probe task, spatial cueing task and visual search task, combined with the eye scanning technique, are used to study attentional bias in social anxiety disorder. However, question remains about the relationship, time course and transition of the three components and calls for further research.

Key words: social anxiety disorder, attentional bias, facilitated attention, difficulty in disengaging, attentional avoidance