The Effect Of Social Connectedness On Fear Generalization Of Individuals With Different Degrees Of Social Anxiety And Its Cognitive Neural Mechanism

Fear Generalization is a phenomenon in which an individual learns to fear one threat stimulus and then reacts to another similar stimulus with fear.Moderate fear generalization is beneficial to individual’s adaptation to stress environment,but excessive fear generalization will lead to individual’s fear reaction to safety stimulation,and finally form psychological diseases such as anxiety disorder,which will seriously affect individual’s physical and mental health.As a subtype of anxiety disorder,social anxiety is defined as anxiety caused by the fear of negative relationships,which has an important effect on the fear generalization process.Previous studies have shown that individuals’ fear generalization and social anxiety may be mediated by their social connections(such as social support and social exclusion).However,it is not clear how social connectedness influences the relationship between social anxiety and fear generalization.To fill this gap,this study uses the Classic Paradigm of Fear Generalization,combined with the ERP technique in 2 experiments.Experiment 1 examined how social support influences the relationship between social anxiety and fear generalization.Participants were asked to provide a picture of a significant other in their social support system(such as a parent,a loved one,etc.)as a social support picture before the experiment,and a stranger as a control.During the experiment,participants in the social support condition were presented with a picture of their social support before each generalized stimulus,and again,in the stranger condition,the stranger image also presented an experimental paradigm before each generalization,using the classic fear Generalization Paradigm,repeated pairing of nonthreatening Conditional Stimuli(such as circles of different sizes)with threatening nconditional stimuli(such as electric shocks)In this process,the subjects learned to fear the non-threatening conditioned stimulus(circle pattern),and used the possibility of electric shock after generalized stimulus as a behavioral indicator,whether they also fear the generalization stimulus similar to the conditioned stimulus during the generalization stage was examined.Results showed that the main effect of stimulus was significant,and both groups were successful in fear generalization.Second,high social anxiety individuals are more prone to excessive fear generalization.At the same time,social support played a buffer role to fear generalization.Importantly,the study found that subjects with high social anxiety scored significantly higher on subjective expectations than those with low social anxiety,even under social support,suggesting that,the buffer effect of social support played a role in fear generalization with high anxiety,but it was also weaker in high social anxiety subjects than in low social anxiety subjects.In addition,the P300 amplitude of the subjects suggesting that the subjects with higher social anxiety were less certain of generalizing stimuli in the stranger condition,it needs more cognitive resources to process.The stranger condition also stimulated significant LPP amplitudes,and the individuals had more emotion regulation under the stranger condition.In experiment 2,The Cyberball paradigm was used to create social exclusion and social acceptance,and the participants were required to perform the same fear acquisition and generalization tasks as in experiment 1.The behavioral results showed that individuals with high social anxiety were more likely to have excessive fear generalization,and both groups had higher subjective expectations under social exclusion than social acceptance.In addition,social exclusion exacerbates individuals’ fear generalization,the effect was more pronounced in individuals with higher levels of social anxiety.In addition,EEG results showed that the main effect of generalized stimulus was significant,the amplitude of GS + induced by generalization stimulus which is more similar to the more dangerous conditional stimulus is larger than that of GS-induced by generalization stimulus which is more similar to the safe one.The amplitude of P300 induced by generalized stimulus is also different in subjects with high social anxiety under the condition of social exclusion,the results suggest that the subjects with high social anxiety are more certain of the more dangerous stimuli under the condition of social exclusion,which consumes less cognitive resources.At the same time,the P2 amplitude induced by GS + was larger than that induced by GS-,which indicated that the subjects paid more selective attention to GS +This paper draws three conclusions through two experiments: first,the behavior results of experiment 1 and experiment 2 show that individuals with anxiety are more prone to overgeneralization,in this experiment,the subjects with high social anxiety score higher than those with low social anxiety score.Secondly,social connection has an effect on fear generalization.Thirdly,social connection also has an effect on the fear generalization of individuals with different social anxiety.The social buffer effect of social support also played a role in high social anxiety individuals,while social exclusion made the fear of high social anxiety individuals more generalized than low social anxiety individuals.The research on fear generalization in this paper may provide the following implications for the clinical treatment of anxiety disorders: social connectedness is closely related to fear generalization,one of the behavioral markers of social anxiety disorder,social support provides a potential way to suppress excessive fear generalization,and social exclusion is a possible cause of social anxiety disorder.