And what a performance! 👏🏻😮‍💨💯
Congratulations, Dr. Lingelbach 🙌🏻🤩

Also a big shoutout to me co-organizer @isabelneumann.bsky.social!
#teamworkmakesthedreamwork 🤝

You can find our pre-reg here: osf.io/e4rbd
But, of course, we now learned a lot about this new paradigm and we might recommend adjusting some things for similar studies. If you’re interested, we could have a call to discuss this 😊

We are also thrilled to announce our keynote speakers: Rachel McDonnell (Trinity College Dublin) and @michaelgaebler.com (MPI Leipzig) 🎉

In addition, we provided further evidence for a cardiovascular hyperarousal 🫀↗️ in social anxiety, which was not limited to social situations and not modulated by the pressure to adhere to social norms.

Instead, we could show that social anxiety affects social exploration behavior not in a way of general avoidance 🚫, but rather in nuanced adaptations 🌈 depending on the concrete situation, perceived control, likelihood of interaction and associated socio-evaluative threat.

We expected socially anxious participants to show avoidance of potentially crowded spaces 🚷, reduced visual attention on other people 👀, and heightened physiological arousal in social situations 🫀.

Our pre-screened participants with varying trait social anxiety scores went for a walk on a freely chosen route 👣 and then had a staged social interaction with a confederate 👥.
We recorded the chosen route 📍, gaze behavior 👀, and autonomic responses 🫀.

These results imply that social attention is less automatic and reflexive than previously assumed and can be suppressed by executive control to efficiently maintain goal-directed behavior 🤝