Eye gaze during social interactions plays a dual role, both regulating the intake of information and signaling attention and intent to others, thereby facilitating the coordination and structuring of social encounters. Individuals with social anxiety disorder often report an intense fear of being observed and evaluated by others, yet previous eye-tracking studies have yielded inconsistent findings regarding potential anomalies in their gaze behavior during social situations. This inconsistency may arise from the reliance on constrained laboratory settings, the use of global analyses involving highly aggregated metrics of gaze behavior, and the failure to capture the complexities of real-time social interactions. Enhancing the ecological validity of experimental settings while harnessing analyses of temporal dynamics could provide a more comprehensive understanding of how social anxiety shapes gaze behavior. Such insights might also illuminate how these gaze patterns contribute to the perpetuation of clinical symptoms by eliciting negative responses from interaction partners. The proposed research seeks to bridge these gaps through innovative methodologies that capture detailed behavioral and autonomic data during social interactions in both real-world settings and virtual environments with AI-driven agents. Spanning three extensive studies, the project will explore how social anxiety and the emotional content of interactions influence gaze dynamics and physiological arousal. By employing cross-recurrence quantification analyses, the research will uncover dynamic patterns of interaction between individuals that have not been examined before. Additionally, the direct manipulation of gaze behavior within the virtual reality framework will allow the investigation of its causal effects on perceptions of conversation quality and evaluations of interaction partners. This research is expected to provide significant insights into the intricate ways social anxiety affects gaze behavior and its physiological and interpersonal outcomes. Furthermore, the development of a novel virtual reality platform for studying complex social phenomena under controlled experimental conditions offers an innovative avenue for research. Beyond advancing our understanding of the regulatory functions of gaze in naturalistic social interactions, these findings also have critical clinical implications, potentially guiding the development of targeted therapeutic strategies for individuals with social anxiety disorders.

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 563076576