A Two-Person Neuroscience Approach for Social Anxiety: A Paradigm With Interbrain Synchrony and Neurofeedback

Social anxiety disorder has been widely recognised as one of the most commonly diagnosed mental disorders. Individuals with social anxiety disorder experience difficulties during social interactions that are essential in the regular functioning of daily routines; perpetually motivating research into the aetiology, maintenance and treatment methods. Traditionally, social and clinical neuroscience studies incorporated protocols testing one participant at a time. However, it has been recently suggested that such protocols are unable to directly assess social interaction performance, which can be revealed by testing multiple individuals simultaneously. The principle of two-person neuroscience highlights the interpersonal aspect of social interactions that observes behaviour and brain activity from both (or all) constituents of the interaction, rather than analysing on an individual level or an individual observation of a social situation. Therefore, two-person neuroscience could be a promising direction for assessment and intervention of the social anxiety disorder. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm which integrates two-person neuroscience in a neurofeedback protocol. Neurofeedback and interbrain synchrony, a branch of two-person neuroscience, are discussed in their own capacities for their relationship with social anxiety disorder and relevance to the paradigm. The newly proposed paradigm sets out to assess the social interaction performance using interbrain synchrony between interacting individuals, and to employ a multi-user neurofeedback protocol for intervention of the social anxiety.

An Explorative Study to Assess the Prevalence of Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) and Its Determinants among High School Students of Selected High School of Bagalkot

Introduction: As per research studies have shown that social anxiety disorder has a worldwide prevalence of 5 to 10% and a lifetime prevalence rate of 8.4% to 15% among high school students.1 Rural Indian children are facing this problem of lethal evil more as compared to Urban high school students in India. Objective: To assess the prevalence of social anxiety disorder [sad] and its determinants among high school students of selected high school of Bagalakote. Methods: Descriptive survey approach was used for the study with cross sectional survey design. 120 high school students between 14 years to 16 years of age were selected Disproportionate stratified random sampling technique method from high school students studying in selected high school of Bagalkot. The data regarding determinants was collected by structured interview schedule and self-report method. The Social Phobia Inventory (abbreviated as SPIN) is a five point scale was used to categories the high school students according to their social anxiety disorders. The association was explored by Chi square test, Fisher’s exact probability test and linear regression. Results: Total 120 high school students were responded for Social Phobia Inventory (SPIN) scale, in that level of social anxiety disorders had reveals that majority 83.3% had non phobic, 15.8% had mild and 0.8% had moderate, there is no extremely phobic. A significant association was found between the social anxiety disorders of adolescents and their selected socio-demographic variables like monthly income (χ2= 21.199; P<0.05). Conclusion: The findings revealed that there was a positive correlation found between the psychological wellbeing and academic performance among adolescents, recommended health education, early recommended understanding the social anxiety disorder and its determinants by their students especially among the fresher`s. Effectiveness of teaching programmes regarding impact of its determinants on level of social anxiety disorders among adolescents can be done had positive effect on adolescents health, which were also statistically significant. Key words: Social anxiety disorder, Determinants, Adolescents, high school students, academic performance, Spin scale.

The Study of Face Processing in Social Anxiety Disorder Based on Face-Specific N170 Component

Although previous studies showed that social anxiety disorder (SAD) exhibits the attentional bias for angry faces, few studies investigated effective face recognition combined with event-related potential (ERP) technique in SAD patients, especially the treatment effect. This study examines the differences in face processing in SAD patients before and after treatment and healthy control people (H-group). High-density EEG scans were registered in response to emotional schematic faces, particularly interested in the face processing N170 component. Analysis of N170 amplitude revealed a larger N170 for P-group-pre in response to inverted and upright stimuli than H-group in the right hemisphere. The result of the intragroup t-test showed that N170 was delayed for inverted relative to upright faces only in P-group-post and H-group but not in P-group-pre. Remarkably, the results of ANOVAs manifested that emotional expression cannot modulate N170 for SAD patients. Besides, the N170-based asymmetry index (AI) was introduced to analyze the left- and right-hemisphere dominance of N170 for three groups. It was found that, with the improvement of patients’ treatment, the value of A I N 170 − b a s e d presented a decreasing trend. These results together suggested that there was no inversion effect observed for patients with SAD. The change in the value of A I N 170 − b a s e d can be used as potential electrophysiological markers for the diagnosis and treatment effects on patients with SAD.