Towards a cross-modal exploration of cognitive biases in social anxiety

Cognitive models suggest that social anxiety is associated with cognitive biases towards threat-related social cues. So far, research has mainly concentrated on emotional facial expressions. Therefore, the aim of this thesis was to provide one of the first empirical steps towards a cross-modal investigation of cognitive biases in social anxiety. Three questions guided our work: (1) Does social anxiety influence the processing of task-irrelevant angry prosody? (2) Does social anxiety affect the emotional interpretation of facial and vocal expressions? (3) Are facial and vocal cues of social rank processed in an involuntary way, and is the processing of such cues modulated by social anxiety? Though some interesting findings regarding the influence of social anxiety on such processes have been found, we emphasized the need for further investigations to address the methodological limitations of our studies and the role of potential moderators.