Brandon Brown
Pronouns: He/His/Him
Research Mentor(s): Hanjoo Kim
Co-Presenter: Tran, Isabella
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Department of Psychiatry / Medicine
Presentation Date: April 20
Presentation Type: Oral5
Session: Session 2 – 11am – 11:50am
Room: Breakout Room 2
Authors:
Presenter: 3
Abstract
Social anxiety disorder (SAD) presents itself as a highly regular disorder in the general population. SAD commonly develops during teen maturation and is perpetuated by the situations high school and college students experience, allowing it to become a chronic condition. SAD causes individuals to have an increased attention for negative social stimuli and higher tendencies to carry a negative self image and mindset. This fear of social settings and perception by others leads individuals with SAD to isolate themselves leading to a lower quality of life in all aspects. This study focuses on individuals with social anxiety disorder (SAD) and explores treatment techniques that utilize attention bias modification. Participants with and without SAD are presented with one of three faces (happy, neutral, angry), and their responses in relation to the behavioral attention modification are measured. Each participant is randomly assigned attention training or the control condition. In attention training, their attention is drawn by a dot probe to either a happy or angry face. In control training, a participant is shown both. Subjective surveys measuring pleasantness/intensity as well as skin conductance response (SCR) are collected after training to determine the effectiveness of attention bias modification for individuals with SAD. SCR measures the amount of sweat an individual produces by the amount of sweat on their palm. SCR is generally known to be associated with highly arousing or unpleasant stimuliThe project also focuses the effect of attention training on emotional responses to affective faces in both SAD and HC, as no previous research has explored this before. The data from this project can be analyzed to identify attention patterns of individuals with and without SAD. Further, the results can be utilized to develop and improve treatments for individuals with SAD.
Biomedical Sciences
