Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous studies have suggested that, socially anxious individuals tend to avoid eye contact while looking toward faces.The study designed an emotional faces task consisted of human and comic face stimuli with 6 different emotions (happy,angry, sad, scared, stunned, confused), and recorded the eye movements to examine the hypotheses above. The resultsrevealed that high social anxiety (HSA), medium social anxiety (MSA) and low social anxiety (LSA) individuals have nosignificant difference on total fixation duration of the eyes, nose, and mouth among 6 different emotions. However, whilefocusing on the angry expression, LSA have significantly higher total fixation duration, visit count and area normalizedscore on the nose. It shows that LSA tend to focus on the nose intentionally when a person shows an angry face. Further-more, HSA show lower proportion of eyes to eyes, nose and mouth fixation duration than MSA in happy, sad and stunfaces.