Research has shown attentional bias and hypervigilance in individuals with social anxiety (SA) during the observation of emotional facial expressions, particularly with static stimuli such as pictures or schematic faces. Here, we investigated the recognition of dynamic and static facial expressions and eye tracking correlates in volunteers with symptoms of SA and controls. Fifty-six volunteers took part in the study, divided into a control group (CG) with low SA and a group with symptoms of SA (SAG). The stimuli were emotional faces of joy, disgust, anger, and sadness presented in four emotional intensities (25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%) presented statically (pictures) and dynamically (short movies from a neutral expression to the emotional expression). During the emotion recognition task, binocular eye movements were registered, and the number and duration of eye fixations were analyzed. Repeated-measures ANOVAs revealed that the SAG had a higher recognition rate only for low-intensity (25%) sadness. Both groups had a larger number of fixations for static than dynamic stimuli, as well as longer fixations for dynamic than static stimuli. Significant differences between groups were observed with dynamic stimuli, since the SAG presented larger number of fixations and shorter durations than the CG. Thus, our results revealed a negative bias towards sadness and a hypervigilance (more fixations with faster durations) pattern during the evaluation of emotional faces.
