Impaired visuocortical discrimination learning of socially conditioned stimuli in social anxiety.

ABSTRACT: In search of causative factors of social anxiety disorder (SAD), classical conditioning has been discussed as a potential trigger mechanism for many years. Recent findings suggest that the social relevance of the unconditioned stimulus (US) might play a major role in learning theories of SAD. Thus, this study applied a social conditioning paradigm with disorder-relevant US to examine the electrocortical correlates of affective learning. Twenty-four high socially anxious (HSA) and 23 age- and gender-matched low socially anxious (LSA) subjects were conditioned to 3 different faces flickering at a frequency of 15 Hz which were paired with auditory insults, compliments or neutral comments (US). The face-evoked electrocortical response was measured via steady-state visually evoked potentials an

SUBMITTER: Ahrens LM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4483562 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature