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Introduction
Individuals with social anxiety disorder have significant and persistent fear in one or more social conditions (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). According to the cognitive-behavioural therapy models (e.g. Clark and Wells, 1995), fear of negative evaluation (FNE) is a core feature of social anxiety. Clark and Wells (1995) posit that people with social anxiety have some attentional processing bias, which prevents them from collecting evidence that they do much better than they imagine, and maintains the cycle.
Considerable evidence shows that social anxiety is maintained in part by the decreased processing of positive social stimuli. For example, using an eye movement-based method, Chen, Clarke, MacLeod and Guastella (2012) found that socially anxious individuals show faster attentional disengagement from positive stimuli, and their lower total fixation times to positive stimuli are associated with higher levels of state anxiety. Using a dot-probe paradigm, Taylor, Bomyea and Amir (2010, 2011) found that socially anxious participants show diminished attentional allocation for positive social words compared with neutral words at 500 milliseconds, after a speech task. In line with this notion, Silvia, Allan, Beauchamp, Maschauer and Workman (2006) also reported that participants with social anxiety take longer to recognize happy faces. Socially anxious participants also selectively neglect positive responses from audiences (Perowne and Mansell, 2002). Vassilopoulos and Banerjee (2010) also found that participants with social anxiety might disqualify positive social events, which leads to the experience of low positive affect.
Although the available literature supports the association between social anxiety and the avoidance of positive stimuli, it remains unknown whether the avoidance is a result of initial allocation of spatial attention or a result of controlled strategies for sustained attention. Various possibilities for socially anxious individuals' avoidance of positive stimuli have been debated. Some researchers support the idea of strategic processing. Researchers found that high socially anxious individuals worry about the initial positive appraisal, which may lead to future negative appraisal, so they choose to perceive others' friendliness in a negative way (Alden, Taylor, Mellings and Laposa, 2008; Weeks, Rodebaugh, Heimberg, Norton and Jakatdar, 2009). However, others support the initial allocation of spatial attention hypothesis. They suggested that social anxiety is maintained by a deficit in the attentional processing of positive information. Participants with...