Topic: social anxiety

Constant monitoring of behavioral patterns shapes successful social interactions. Factors such as interpersonal distance and emotional expressions prompt specific responses to facilitate functional social exchanges. Despite extensive research on these topics, studying how these features influence human physiological responses in an ecological yet controlled environment has often proven challenging. Moreover, the relation between a possible dysregulation of these physiological reactions and social anxiety remains unclear. Using a 3D virtual setting, we found increased physiological responses (

Aims. The aim of our study was to investigate the relationship between social anxiety (SA) and empathy. Based on EEG ERP technique, we examined how socially anxious individuals process empathy for pain in relation to perspective taken. Methods. The ERP procedure involved images depicting hands in painful and neutral situations, after which participants evaluated the degree of perceived painfulness and unpleasantness of the stimuli. The study was divided into blocks, each preceding with the instruction to take first-person perspective (FPP) or third-person perspectives (TPP). Participants (N=65