Social Anxiety Increases Autonomic and Visuocortical Generalization of Conditioned Aversive Responses to Faces

Aversive generalization learning is an adaptive trait that is necessary for survival in a dynamic environment. However, this process is exaggerated in persons with anxiety disorders, leading to overgeneralization of learned threat associations, hyperreactive fight-or-flight responses, and persistent avoidance. Patients with social anxiety disorder (SAD) exhibit impaired conditioned threat discrimination particularly with respect to social stimuli, such as faces. The present study examined the relationship between social anxiety and generalization of visuocortical and pupil dilation responses to a series of facial morphs, one of which was always paired with a noxious sound. Steady-state visual evoked potentials (ssVEPs; N = 65) increasingly fit a model of generalization, and pupil dilation responses (N = 62) also decreasingly discriminated the CS+ as a function of social anxiety. These results contribute to a growing body of work suggesting that SAD dysregulates the ability of autonomic responses to specifically target social threat. The finding of widened visuocortical tuning in SAD implicates a role of the visual system in driving attentional biases in anxiety disorders, including increased visual processing of safety signals similar to threat cues.