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Theories of aberrant attentional processing in social anxiety, and anxiety disorders more broadly, have postulated an initial hypervigilance or facilitation to clinically relevant threats and consequent defensive avoidance. However, existing objective measurements utilized to explore this phenomenon lack the resolution to elucidate attentional dynamics, particularly covert influences.

We utilized a continuous measure of visuocortical engagement, the steady-state visual evoked potential in response to naturalistic angry, fearful, happy, and neutral facial expressions. Participants were treatment-seeking patients with principal diagnoses of social anxiety circumscribed to performance situations (n = 21) or generalized across interaction contexts (n = 42), treatment-seeking patients with panic disorder with agoraphobia (n = 25), and 17 healthy participants.

At the principal disorder level, only …