Acute stress impairs attentional control and emotional processing in social anxiety.

Overview

1. Department of Psychology, Education, and Child Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, 3062 PA Rotterdam, the Netherlands
2. Biological and Clinical Psychology, Department of Psychology, University of Trier, 54296 Trier, Germany
3. Institute for Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, University of Trier, 54296 Trier, Germany

Abstract

Processing emotional faces poses a particular challenge for socially anxious individuals. Acute social stress may further alter attentional allocation and emotional processing, yet the temporal neural dynamics of these changes remain unclear. Using an electroencephalogram (EEG), we examined attentional bias and face processing through an attentional threat bias task and a passive face-viewing task following stress induction. Results showed that acute stress biased a sustained visuospatial attention toward the left visual field, which indicates reduced flexibility in reallocating attention across competing affective stimuli. Stress also broadly reduced event-related potential (ERP) amplitudes and attenuated frontal alpha event-related desynchronization (alpha ERD), suggesting diminished attentional resource availability and cortical control. Notably, early rapid responses to threatening faces remain intact. Together, these findings indicate that acute stress reorganizes attentional processing by depleting resources required for sustained attention and regulatory engagement, potentially exacerbating social information processing vulnerabilities in social anxiety.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

Code

The paper says that its authors' code is available on request: it was not published with the paper, so there is nothing to verify.

The paper's code and data availability statement is in the Data section.

Tracing map

A tracing map links a paper to the code its authors published: this paper has none (its code is available on request), so it has no map.

Data

Datasets cited

• osf:rmszq, at OSF; found in “Data and code availability”

Data and code availability

All data reported in this article have been deposited at the Open Science Framework project repository (https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/RMSZQ) and are publicly available as of the date of publication.

This paper does not report original code.

Any additional information required to reanalyze the data reported in this paper is available from the lead contact upon request.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

Versions

The history of this record: each version stored by the harvester or made by a correction of its authors or of the maintainers of its code, and what changed in its facts. The texts of the paper (its abstract, its availability statements) are not part of it; versions that changed only those are not listed.

Version 1, 29 September 2026: the first record

Recorded: type, language, journal, volume, issue, pages, dates, 5 authors, 4 keywords, 1 funder, 134 references.

Cite

This paper

Li, M., Wong, A. H., von Dawans, B., Domes, G., & Wieser, M. J. (2026). Acute stress impairs attentional control and emotional processing in social anxiety. iScience, 29(5), 115767. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2026.115767

Similar papers

The papers with a page that share the most with this one: the tools found in their code, their categories, datasets, cited references and authors, the rarest counting most.

[1] doi:10.1038/s41598-026-42906-0

Social learning of emotion and its implication for memory: an ERP study.

Journal: Scientific reports

In common: EEG, cognitive, 3 references

[2] doi:10.1016/j.ijchp.2026.100713 [code]

Capturing the multimodal dynamics of acute stress responses: Evidence from the Montreal Imaging Stress Task (MIST).

Journal: International journal of clinical and health psychology : IJCHP

In common: EEG, cognitive, 3 references

[3] doi:10.1016/j.isci.2026.116936 [code]

Beyond neural oscillations: Stress-related aperiodic activity and aperiodic-oscillatory spectral covariation.

Journal: iScience

In common: EEG, 3 references

[4] doi:10.3758/s13415-026-01450-0 [code]

Attentional processing in individual anxiety: Electrocortical correlates of threat- and safety-related declarative memory formation.

Journal: Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience

In common: EEG, cognitive, 3 references

[5] doi:10.1111/jne.70185 [code]

Testosterone, cortisol, and fNIRS-based cortical activation associated with competitive task persistence and difficulty.

Journal: Journal of neuroendocrinology

In common: 3 references

[6] doi:10.1007/s00221-026-07266-1

Working memory load and search efficiency in conventional monitor-based 2D versus 3D virtual settings: analysis of response times and parietal induced alpha activity in a modified Sternberg task.

Journal: Experimental brain research

In common: EEG, cognitive, 3 references

[7] doi:10.1038/s41398-026-04122-2 [code]

Multi-session CBM-I for social anxiety: examining psychopathology, cognitive, neural, and psychophysiological effects in a randomized controlled trial.

Journal: Translational psychiatry

In common: 3 references

[8] doi:10.3758/s13415-026-01436-y

Neural correlates of asymmetric switch costs during affective task switching.

Journal: Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience

In common: EEG, cognitive, 2 references

[9] doi:10.1162/imag.a.1206

Affective face biases in visual and prefrontal cortex measured with visual entrainment.

Journal: Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.)

In common: cognitive, 2 references

[10] doi:10.1097/j.pain.0000000000004044 [code]

No effect of rhythmic visual stimulation on experimental pain perception.

Journal: Pain

In common: EEG, cognitive, 3 references

Contribute

The authors of this paper can claim it, correct its record and validate its tracing map, and the maintainers of its code (its owner, or a public member of its organization) correct what it says of their repository; anyone signed in can ask for its removal. Every request goes to OSCR's own machine, which answers it; your account page follows them.

Request its removal

To ask OSCR to remove this record, the copies of its authors' scripts or its tracing map, use the removal request page: signed in, you say who you are, what to remove and why, then review and confirm the request. Published rules decide every request (how).

Discussion: questions and error reports about this paper and its code, from signed-in readers and its authors. It opens with sign-in.

Reproductions: reports from readers who ran the authors' code: what they reproduced, with which environment, commit and data. It opens with sign-in.

Activity: what happens around this paper: new versions of its record, its map's validation, discussions and reproductions. It opens with sign-in.