Comparison of Recognition of Facial Affect in Patients Suffering from Social phobia and Normal Individuals

De Ruiter and Brosschot (1995) have suggested a process in patients with social anxiety disorder in reaction to their feared stimulus. At the first stage of processing there is an attentional shift towards the stimulus, followed by a later stage in which the stimulus is avoided, so the aim of this study was to investigate the recognition of facial expressions in patients with a social anxiety disorder in compare to healthy control group and in the other hand comparison of emotion recognition in two groups of social phobia patients with different duration of emotional stimulus presentation
the sample size is over 45 individuals, consist of 30 persons with social phobia disorder and 15 individuals as control group, 30 people with social phobia was divided into two group thus15 persons with 500 milliseconds presentation of emotional stimulus and 15 persons with 2/5 second presentation of emotional stimuli.
Results showed that two groups with social phobia didn’t have significant differences in facial affect recognition except in disgust and neutral emotions thus social phobia people by 500 millisecond's presentation had weaker performance in neutral and disgust recognition.
So the avoidance in negative emotions recognition in this group of individual couldn’t be explained by De Ruiter and Brosschot (1995) approach.