Social Anxiety Predicts Enhanced Electrocortical Sensitivity to the Mental State Meanings Revealed by Gaze Patterns

ABSTRACT

Social anxiety—a fear of social interaction and negative evaluation—may be accompanied by heightened vigilance toward others' mental states, particularly those conveyed through gaze, as they provide cues about how one is being evaluated. We thus investigated whether individual differences in social anxiety predict neural sensitivity to the mental‐state meanings conveyed by gaze patterns. Fifty‐seven European American young adults varying in social anxiety viewed different gaze patterns, immediately followed by a mental‐state word that was either congruent or incongruent with the culturally recognized meaning of the gaze, while their electroencephalogram (EEG) was monitored. Our focus was N400—an event‐related potential (ERP) component indexing semantic expectation violations. We found the N400 amplitude to be more negative for incongruent (vs. congruent) mental‐state words. Notably, this N400 incongruity effect increased significantly with social anxiety. Moreover, the social anxiety effect was specific to mental state inference and was not observed in a comparable N400 incongruity effect involving animal stereotypes ( n  = 50). These findings suggest that social anxiety may confer enhanced neural sensitivity during the inference of others' mental states from gaze, even in the absence of overt performance differences. We discuss the implications of these findings with respect to the potential functional benefits of social anxiety.