ORIGINAL ARTICLE Attentional Bias in Social Anxiety: Manipulation of Stimulus Duration and Social-evaluative Anxiety Margarita S. P. Ononaiye Æ Graham Turpin Æ John G. Reidy Published online: 28 March 2007 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007 Abstract This study investigated the nature of pre-attentive and conscious attentional processing to different categories of threatening words in a non-clinical socially anxious sample. Individuals high (n = 41) and low (n = 41) in social avoidance and distress, as measured by the Social Avoidance and Distress Scale (SAD), performed a visual dot- probe task which included four word groups; negative evaluation, social situations, somatic sensation and physical threat. Participants completed masked trials (14 ms + masking for 486 ms), followed by unmasked trials (500 ms/no mask), under conditions of either social-evaluation or non-evaluation. The results showed that in the social-evaluation condition, high socially anxious individuals, in comparison to the low socially anxious, demonstrated an attentional bias towards masked physical threat words. There were no further attentional processing differences between the social anxiety groups to masked or unmasked stimuli, in either experimental condition. The results suggest that theories of social anxiety might need to accommodate biases to physical threat cues. Keywords Social anxiety Á Attentional bias Á Selective attention Cognitive theories of anxiety predict that anxious individuals focus their attention towards threatening stimuli that are relevant to their current concerns (e.g., Beck, Emery, & Greenberg, 1985; Eysenck, 1997; Mogg & Bradley, 1998; Mogg, Bradley, de Bono, & Painter, 1997; Williams, Watts, MacLeod, & Mathews, 1997). This attentional bias to threat occurs both at preconscious and conscious levels in non-clinical and clinically anxious individuals and with and without increases in state anxiety (for reviews see Mogg & Bradley, 1998; Williams et al., 1997). Moreover, the vigilance-avoidance M. S. P. Ononaiye (&) Á G. Turpin Clinical Psychology Department, The University of Sheffield, Western Bank, Sheffield S10 2TP, UK e-mail: m.ononaiye@sheffield.ac.uk J. G. Reidy Collegiate Crescent Campus, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield S10 2BP, UK Cogn Ther Res (2007) 31:727–740 DOI 10.1007/s10608-006-9096-8 123