Does gaze anxiety predict actual gaze avoidance and is it more informative than social anxiety?

Background and Objectives

In recent years eye-tracking studies have provided converging evidence that socially anxious individuals avoid looking at other people's faces in social situations. In addition to these objective measures, the Gaze Anxiety Rating Scale (GARS) has increasingly been used as a self-report measure of gaze avoidance. However, extant results concerning its predictive validity were inconsistent. Moreover, no study has considered social anxiety and gaze anxiety together to examine their relative contributions to actual gaze behavior.

Methods

To address these two questions, eye-tracking data collected from 81 female students during the initial 6 min of a face-to-face conversation with a female confederate were analyzed. Gaze anxiety and social anxiety were measured via the GARS and the Leibowitz Social Anxiety Scale.

Results

The results revealed that gaze anxiety was associated with reduced face gaze while speaking. Social anxiety was not only associated with decreased face gaze during speaking, but also across the initial conversation. Moreover, there was no evidence that gaze anxiety made an additional contribution to social anxiety in predicting face gaze behavior.

Limitations

This study examined face gaze instead of eye gaze. Additionally, the self-report data were not collected on the same day as the eye-tracking data.

Conclusions

The findings indicate that, in a community sample, gaze anxiety does predict actual gaze behavior during a face-to-face initial encounter, but social anxiety is a stronger predictor.