Neurophysiological Effects of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in Social Anxiety: An ERP Study

Abstract Background: Social anxious individuals show attention bias towards emotional stimuli, this phenomenon is considered to be an important cause of anxiety generation and maintenance. Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is a standard psychotherapy for social anxiety disorder. CBT decreases attention biases by correcting the maladaptive beliefs of socially anxious individuals, but it is not clear whether CBT alters neurophysiological features of socially anxious individuals at early automatic and/or late cognitive strategy stage of attentional processing.Method: To address this knowledge gap, we collected pre-treatment event-related potential data of socially anxious individuals while they performed a dot-probe task. These participants then received eight weeks of CBT, and post-treatment ERP data were collected after completion of CBT treatment. Results: Participants’ social anxiety level was significantly alleviated with CBT. ERP results revealed that (1) compared to pre-treatment phase, P1 amplitudes induced by probes significantly decreased at post-treatment phase, whereas P3 amplitudes increased at post-treatment phase; (2) amplitude of components elicited by face pairs did not change significantly between pre-treatment and post-treatment phases; (3) changes of Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale were positively correlated with changes of P1 amplitude, and negatively correlated with changes of N1 amplitude.Limitations: Our sample was university students, which limits the generalizability of the results.Conclusion: The present results demonstrated that CBT alters ERPs appeared in probe-presenting stage for social anxiety, which suggested that key to the effective intervention was the adjustment of cognitive strategies in the later stage of attentional processing.