Manuscript Critique Mogg, K., Pierre P., & Term Paper

Manuscript Critique

Mogg, K., Pierre P., & Bradley, B.P. (2004). Selective attention to angry faces in clinical social phobia. J Abnormal Psych, 113 (1), 160-165.

The present study investigated the time course of attentional biases to emotional facial responses in patients with diagnosed social phobia. The social phobia group showed enhanced vigilance to angry faces, relative to happy and neutral faces, compared to matched controls at 500 ms but not 1250 ms of exposure duration

The results of the present study provide evidence for initial vigilance for angry faces in patients with clinical social anxiety. These data are consistent with several studies related to cognitive bias in anxiety disorders (Mogg & Bradley, 1998). Results from this study suggest that social phobia has a different pattern of attentional bias from other anxiety disorders. Social phobia is characterized by attentional avoidance rather than vigilance for external threat cues.

The finding of attentional bias for angry faces at 500 ms in patients with high-trait social anxiety is consistent with previous research (Mogg & Bradley, 1998). However, several studies have reported avoidance of emotional faces presented at 500 ms (Mansell, Clark, Ehlers, & Chen, 1999). Thus, research in this particular field is inconclusive at best.

This was a prospective, nonrandomized, controlled trial.A convenience sample of 15 test subjects were enrolled based on diagnosis of social phobia. Control subjects had no known history of psychological disorders and were matched for baseline characteristics such as age, gender, and educational status. The control group used in this study was adequate. A stronger study design would have been to randomly select subjects within each group, thus minimizing bias. A potential confounding factor that was not controlled for was reaction time. Thus, reaction times may have been different between groups at study onset. This variable may have potentially been used as a covariate in the analysis of variance model to minimize confounding effects.

There is no indication as to whether a power analysis was conducted before this study. Thus, it is impossible to determine if this study had ample power to detect significant differences if in fact they truly existed. Aside from a lack of psychological disorders and matched baseline variables, selection criteria for the control group were not stated. Thus, selection bias may have been a threat to the internal validity of this study.

The authors readily admit that techniques such as online monitoring of eye movements during attentional tasks….....