Moral fixations: The role of moral integrity and social anxiety in the selective avoidance of social threat

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Moral fixations: The role of moral integrity and social anxiety in the selective avoidance of social threat Lotte F. Van Dillen a,∗ , Dorien Enter a,b,1 , Leonie P.M. Peters a,1 , Wilco W. van Dijk a , Mark Rotteveel c,d a

Leiden University, The Netherlands Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands c University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands d Amsterdam Brain Cognition, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands b

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history: Received 6 July 2015 Received in revised form 22 January 2016 Accepted 28 January 2016 Available online xxx Keywords: Moral integrity Emotional expression Eye-tracking Social anxiety

a b s t r a c t People derive their sense of belonging from perceptions of being a moral person. Research moreover suggests that social cues of rejection rapidly influence visual scanning, and result in avoidant gaze behavior, especially in socially anxious individuals. With the current eye-tracking experiment, we therefore examined whether moral integrity threats and affirmations influence selective avoidance of social threat, and how this varies with individual differences in social anxiety. Fifty-nine participants retrieved a memory of a past immoral, moral, or neutral act. Next, participants passively viewed angry, happy, and neutral faces, while we recorded how often they first fixated on the eyes. In addition, we administered the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (1987). Participants first fixated less on angry eyes compared to happy or neutral eyes when their moral integrity was threatened, and this selective avoidance was enhanced with increasing social anxiety. Following a moral affirmation, however, participants no longer selectively avoided the eyes of angry faces, regardless of individual differences in social anxiety. The results thus suggest that both low and high socially anxious people adjust their social gaze behavior in response to threats and affirmations of their moral integrity, pointing to the importance of the social context when considering affective processing biases. © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction People value social inclusion because it provides them with a sense of belonging and because it boosts their self-esteem (Knowles and Gardner, 2008; Twenge, Catanese, & Baumeister, 2003). Given the importance of being socially included, monitoring signs of social rejection and adjusting ones behavior accordingly, are therefore crucial strategies for people to safeguard their standing in a group (Gilbert, 2000). However, sometimes people experience moral failures, and these failures can provide the basis for negative responses from others (Brambilla et al., 2011). Several studies have shown that people value being a moral person (Schwartz and Bardi, 2001), and that they adjust their behavior on the basis of their past (im) moral acts (Jordan, Mullen, & Murningham, 2011). This self-perceived moral standing at any

∗ Corresponding author at: Institute of Psychology, Social and Organizational Psychology Unit/Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden University, P.O. Box 9555, 2300 RB Leiden, The Netherlands. Fax: +31 71 5273619. E-mail address: [email protected] (L.F. Van Dillen). 1 Both authors contributed equally to this work.

given point, also called moral integrity, is sometimes described to operate as a ‘thermometer’ (Jordan and Monin, 2008). The moral emotions that arise from threats to one’s moral self-regard regulate people’s behavior to safeguard inclusion (Baumeister and Leary, 1995; Pickett, Gardner, & Knowles, 2004). Moral emotions such as guilt and shame in response to a moral integrity threat motivate people to engage in reparatory behavior (Jordan et al., 2011; Gilbert, 2000; Haidt, 2003; Keltner and Harker, 1998), while emotions such as pride and positive feelings about the self in response to a moral affirmation operate as a buffer, and may lead people to behave more self-promoting (Jordan and Monin, 2008; Sachdeva, Iliev & Medin, 2009). People who had just recalled their immoral behavior, for example, reported greater participation in moral activities, reported stronger prosocial intentions, and cheated less than people who recalled their moral behavior (Jordan et al., 2011). Whereas the link between moral integrity threats and affirmations on the one hand and reparatory versus self-promoting tendencies on the other hand has been demonstrated across several domains and situations (e.g., Hofmann, Wisneski, Brandt & Skitka, 2014), still relatively little is known about the social monitoring process that is thought to occur in response to self-perceptions of

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2016.01.016 0301-0511/© 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article in press as: Van Dillen, L. F., et al. Moral fixations: The role of moral integrity and social anxiety in the selective avoidance of social threat. Biol. Psychol. (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2016.01.016

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moral integrity. In the present experiment we therefore examined whether changes in participants’ moral integrity moderate visual attention to social cues of rejection and acceptance as revealed by others. Social cues provide information about how behavior is perceived (i.e., acceptable or not; Pickett and Gardner, 2005). Angry facial expressions with direct gaze, for example, signal social scrutiny, and possible rejection, whereas happy faces with direct ¨ gaze signal acceptance, and possible inclusion (Ohman, 1986; Roelofs et al., 2010). Recent eye-tracking evidence suggests that negative facial expressions of anger and fear are rapidly analyzed and influence visual scanning, but, rather than attracting attention, such faces tend to be actively avoided (Becker and Detweiler-Bedell, 2009; Enter, Terburg, Harrewijn, Spinhoven, & Roelofs, 2016). In one study, for example, people looked away from negative social feedback, as evidenced by fewer, and shorter fixations on the photo of the negative evaluator as compared to their own photo (Vanderhasselt, Remue, Ng, Mueller, & De Raedt, 2015). Relatedly, in another study (Silk et al., 2012), youth who had just been rejected in a chatroom interaction task, looked away from their own crossed out picture more than when they had just been accepted. The above eye-tracking findings suggest that people avoid social evaluative cues following a rejection of the self. In line with this, and based on self-affirmation theory (Steele, 1988) one could expect that when an opportunity is present to affirm self-integrity such defensive reactions will decrease to the very same threatening social information. For example, self-affirmation has been found to reduce stress responses in social evaluation tasks, as indicated by lower cortisol responses in affirmed participants compared to participants in a control condition (Creswell et al., 2005). In the above-mentioned studies, moreover, participants displayed less threat-avoidant gaze behavior when they had just been positively evaluated (Vanderhasselt et al., 2015) or had just been accepted by a peer (Silk et al., 2012). It is therefore conceivable that selfperceptions of people’s moral standing regulate their gaze behavior toward social cues of rejection or approval in a similar way, with greater avoidance of negative social cues following a moral integrity threat, but reduced avoidance following a moral affirmation. In addition to our examination of moral integrity threats and affirmations on the avoidance of social cues of rejection and acceptance, in the current study, we also examined the effects of individual differences in social anxiety. Socially anxious individuals are highly concerned with humiliating or embarrassing themselves when under the scrutiny of others (American Psychiatric Association, 2013), and may therefore be especially sensitive to social signs of rejection (Staugaard, 2010). This has for example been illustrated by a large web-based study (Schulze, Lobmaier, Arnold, & Renneberg, 2013), in which participants viewed briefly presented (300 ms) facial expressions with different gaze directions. The greater their self-reported social anxiety, the more likely participants were to indicate that these faces were looking directly at them, especially for negative (angry, fearful) and neutral expressions. Social anxiety is moreover characterized by avoidance of social situations, and has been related specifically to avoidance of eye contact (Horley, Williams, Gonsalvez, & Gordon, 2003). Especially angry facial expressions with direct gaze have been found to elicit increased avoidance tendencies in high socially anxious individuals, as evidenced by fewer fixations on the eye region of angry faces compared to happy or neutral faces (Horley, Williams, Gonsalvez, & Gordon, 2004). Socially anxious individuals thus seem to adjust their gaze strategies as to minimize social information (particularly negative cues), conveyed especially by the eyes (Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, & Jolliffe, 1997). On the basis of the above findings, we expected that moral integrity threats would exacerbate social anxiety effects on the avoidance of social

evaluative threats, whereas we expected that moral affirmations would reduce them. To test the effects of moral integrity and social anxiety on the avoidance of social evaluative threats, we measured individual differences in social anxiety, and then manipulated participants’ self-perceived moral integrity (threatened, affirmed, or unaffected) via an autobiographical recall task. In an allegedly unrelated task we next presented participants with angry, happy, and neutral faces while their spontaneous gaze behavior (i.e., fixations on the faces’ eye regions) was recorded during a passive viewing task. Our primary focus was on people’s first fixations on the eye region. The relative reduction of, especially, first fixations on the eye-region of angry faces has been found to be a reliable index of gaze avoidance (Becker and Detweiler-Bedell, 2009; Gamer and ¨ Buchel, 2012; Gamer, Zurowski & Büchel, 2010; Garner, Mogg & Bradley, 2006). A recent study moreover found that the percentage of first fixations to angry eyes is enhanced by the administration of testosterone (Enter et al., 2016), a hormone known to facilitate social dominance (Terburg and Van Honk, 2013). The first fixation to the eye-region, finally, is considered to be an early automatic component of gaze behavior that reflects a critical feature of communication (Bradley, Codispoti, Cuthbert & Lang, 2001; Gamer & Büchel, 2012). We reasoned that if moral integrity threats heighten participants’ sensitivity to social cues of rejection (i.e., eyes of angry faces), this should result in fewer first fixations on the eye region (i.e., greater selective avoidance) of angry faces versus happy or neutral ones, compared to a control condition. If moral affirmations, on the other hand, reduce people’s sensitivity to social cues of rejection (Silk et al., 2012; Vanderhasselt et al., 2015), this should reduce differentiation in first fixations to the eyes of angry, happy, or neutral faces (i.e., decrease selective avoidance of the eyes of angry faces over happy or neutral ones), compared to a control condition. We moreover predicted the effects of our moral integrity manipulation to vary with individual differences in social anxiety. More specifically, we expected that high compared to low socially anxious participants would be even more sensitive to our moral threat manipulation, as expressed by an even smaller percentage of first fixations on angry eyes versus neutral or happy eyes compared to less socially anxious participants. We however predicted that, compared to a control condition, our moral affirmation would reduce the selective avoidance of social threat cues for both high and low socially anxious individuals, such that all participants would first fixate as frequently on angry compared to happy or neutral eyes. We examined participants’ first fixations to the eyes of happy faces in addition to their first fixations to both angry and neutral eyes, in order to confirm that any reduction in first fixations to angry faces relative to neutral faces indeed reflected the selective avoidance of negative social cues, and not, of socio-emotional cues more generally.

2. Method 2.1. Participants, design, and procedure Of the eighty-one participants that took part in our experiment at Leiden University, we were unable to examine the data of twenty-two participants due to extreme loss of tracking integrity which was caused by defects of the infrared light of the eye tracker, leaving a total of fifty-nine volunteers for our analyses (30 females; 29 males; Mage = 21.90 years, SD = 3.96). Exclusion criteria for participation were use of medication, color blindness, and currently being treated for a mental disorder. All participants had normal or corrected-to-normal vision, were unaware of the aim of the study, and provided written informed consent.

Please cite this article in press as: Van Dillen, L. F., et al. Moral fixations: The role of moral integrity and social anxiety in the selective avoidance of social threat. Biol. Psychol. (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2016.01.016

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Participation in the experiment occurred in exchange for a monetary payment (D 6) or course credits. The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of Leiden University, and was in accordance with the declaration of Helsinki. The experiment had a 3 (moral integrity: threat, affirmation, control; between-participants) × 3 (expression: angry, happy, neutral; within-participants) mixed design. The main dependent variable was the percentage of first fixations on the target’s eye region. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three moral integrity conditions (with 19 or 20 participants in each condition). To disguise the purpose of the experiment, participants were told that the experimental session consisted of three short and separate experiments, (1) a survey measuring social anxiety, (2) a writing task, and (3) a passive viewing task. After participants received these general instructions and had signed the informed consent, they were guided to a dimly lit cubicle in which the actual experiments took place. We report how we determined all data exclusions, all manipulations, and all measures in the study description provided below. 2.2. Materials 2.2.1. Social anxiety Individual differences in social anxiety were assessed using the self-report Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (LSAS-SR; Liebowitz, 1987), which allows for the accurate identification of individuals with social anxiety disorder (Rytwinski et al., 2009). Participants read information about 24 situations (e.g., “telephoning in public”, “participating in small groups”) and were asked two questions about each situation. The first question asked how anxious or fearful they would feel in the situation (0 = none; 3 = severe), whereas the second one asked how often they would avoid the situation (0 = never; 3 = always). For our analyses we used the total score on the LSAS (˛ = 0.79; M = 31.28, SD = 15.91, Median = 30, ranging from 1 to 74), which can be considered a good enough range to examine individual differences in social anxiety, as a cut-off score of 30 is typically used to classify low versus high socially anxious individuals (Rytwinski et al., 2009).

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(2016). Participants were informed that the purpose of this experiment was to study their normal processing of social information, as well as to use the eye tracker for pupil size measurements during the observation of emotional targets. The target faces were selected from the NimStim Face Stimulus Set (Tottenham et al., 2009). Twenty-four happy, angry, and neutral facial expressions were taken from the same model (four male and four female models). The original pictures were adapted so that gray toned, equiluminant oval shaped faces (with neck and hair cut out) with a size of 368 × 515 pixels were presented on a gray background. The task started with the appearance of a gray screen, on which a black fixation cross was presented. Participants were required to focus exactly on the fixation cross for 1s (±0.75 ms) so that a static facial expression could appear on the screen for 5 s. One face at a time was shown on the middle of the screen (10◦ × 12.82◦ visual angle; screen resolution 1280 × 1024 pixels), in such a way that the pretrial fixation cross was situated on the nasal bridge below the eyes. Stimuli were repeated three times, resulting in 72 randomized trials in total, with an inter-trial interval of 4–7 s. The experiment was built up of four blocks each containing 18 trials. Participants were given the opportunity to have a short break in between blocks. The experimental trials were presented in E-prime (Psychology Software Tools, Inc., Pittsburgh, USA). Participants were seated in a dimly lit and sound attenuated room, at a distance of 60–65 cm from the center of the display screen, and were asked to keep their position as stable as possible throughout the task. 2.3. Data acquisition

2.2.2. Moral integrity manipulation and manipulation checks To manipulate moral integrity, participants engaged in an autobiographical recall task (Jordan et al., 2011; Zhong & Liljenquist, 2006). Participants were asked to write in detail about an immoral act they had committed in the past (threat condition) or a moral act they had committed in the past (affirmation condition), and to describe any emotions that accompanied that act. Participants in the control condition were asked to write in detail about the last time they had visited a grocery store (Rucker and Galinsky, 2008). To verify whether participants in the threat condition experienced more negative and less positive (moral) emotions, and whether those in the affirmation condition experienced less negative and more positive (moral) emotions compared to participants in the control condition, we subsequently asked all participants to indicate on 7-point scales (1 = not at all; 7 = very much) the extent to which they experienced seven negative (sadness, guilt, disgust, shame, bad feelings about the self, anger, and fear, respectively) and five positive emotions (happiness, good feelings about the self, pleasure, satisfaction, and pride, respectively). To emphasize that their responses would be treated confidentially, participants were requested to put their descriptions in a white envelope, which was kept in sight of the participants during the entire experimental session.

Eye movements were collected at a sampling rate of 120 Hz with a Tobii T120 infrared eye tracker (Tobii Technology, Danderyd, Sweden), which automatically excluded data with loss of tracking integrity. Each participant was calibrated using a standard procedure including nine fixation points before data collection. Trials with more than 20% invalid data due to blinks identified by a loss of corneal reflections and off-screen gazes were excluded from further analyses (5.18% of the remaining data, which did not differ across conditions). Gaze fixations were defined during stimulus presentation as all subsequent gaze points within an area of interest (AOI) with a minimum duration of 100 ms (Tobii Technology, Danderyd, Sweden). For each stimulus presented in the passive viewing task three AOI regions (eyes, face, outside) were defined in E-prime (Psychology Software Tools, Inc., Pittsburgh, USA), each drawn in rectangular shapes. These AOIs were sized and positioned as follows (relative to the upper left corner of the screen). The eyes AOI consisted of a square (width 22%, height 11%) positioned at a width of 50% and a height of 45%. The face AIO consisted of a square (width 31%, height 50%), positioned at a width of 50% and a height of 50%, thus including the entire face stimulus. The outside of face AOI consisted of all fixations on the rest of the screen. See Fig. 1B for a schematic depiction of an angry face stimulus with all AOIs.1 An in-house designed MATLAB (The Mathworks Inc., Massachusetts) program was used for the transformation of the raw gaze data and for the generation of all gaze variables: the AOI of the first fixation, first fixation duration, as well as the total number of fixations and the total duration of fixations during the entire stimulus presentation. For each participant, the percentage of first fixations on the eye AOI was then calculated as follows: (first fixations on the eye AOI/total number of first fixations) × 100. We similarly calculated the percentage of total number of fixations on the eyes: (number of

2.2.3. Passive viewing task with emotional target faces To assess participants’ selective avoidance of social threat we adopted a passive face-viewing task developed by Enter et al.

1 See Supplementary materials for the analyses of the percentage of first fixations on the face and outside face AOIs.

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Fig. 1. (A) Percentage of first fixations on eye region as a function of moral integrity (threat, control, affirmation) and facial expression (angry, happy, neutral). Error bars reflect standard errors. (B) Example of an angry facial expression and corresponding Area of Interest (AOI) map, with the eyes AOI (in white), face AIO, and outside face AOI (rest of screen).

fixations on eyes AOI/total number of fixations) × 100. All measures were created separately for each target expression (angry, happy, neutral).

Table 1 Self reported negative and positive emotions (Mean, SD) as a function of moral integrity condition (threat, affirmation, control) on 7-point scales (1 = not at all; 7 = very much). Moral integrity

2.4. Statistical analyses A multivariate analysis of variance was conducted to examine the seven self-reported negative emotions (sadness, guilt, disgust, shame, bad feelings about the self, anger, fear), and five positive emotions (happiness, good feelings about the self, pleasure, satisfaction, and pride), with emotion as within-participants’ factor and moral integrity (threat, affirmation, control) as betweenparticipants’ factor. To examine the gaze variables (percentage of first fixations, average duration of first fixations, percentage of total number of fixations, and total fixation duration), a full-factorial GLM repeated measures analysis was conducted with expression (angry, happy, neutral) as within-participants variable, and moral integrity (threat, affirmation, control) and social anxiety (continuous) as between participants variables, followed-up by simple effects analyses and pairwise comparisons. When appropriate, Greenhouse-Geiser corrections were made. Any interaction effects of social anxiety and expression were further analyzed by comparing estimated means on the basis of one standard deviation below/above the standardized LSAS score (see Cohen, Cohen, West, & Aiken, 2003, for this procedure), as a follow up to the GLM multivariate regression model. This procedure allows for the assessment of the influence of categorical and continuous predictor variables and their interactions as in a multivariate ANOVA, while retaining the continuous character of individual difference variables, such as LSAS scores (see Tabachnick & Fidell, 2001, 901–903 pp.; see also Van Dillen, Papies, & Hofmann, 2013). 3. Results 3.1. Social anxiety Social anxiety scores did not vary between the three moral integrity conditions, F(56, 2) < 1, p = 0.680. We did observe a significant gender difference, F(56, 1) = 4.39, p = 0.048, p 2 = 0.18, with

Threat

Affirmation

Control

Negative emotions Sadness Guilt Disgust Shame Bad feelings about the self Anger Fear

2.55 (1.88) 5.00 (1.75) 3.10 (1.83) 4.50 (1.82) 4.30 (2.18) 2.30 (1.66) 2.25 (1.55)

1.89 (1.68) 1.72 (1.57) 1.56 (1.65) 1.61 (1.46) 1.61 (1.34) 1.94 (1.98) 1.67 (1.64)

1.50 (0.95) 1.35 (0.81) 1.35 (0.81) 1.50 (1.05) 2.00 (1.41) 1.65 (1.04) 1.50 (0.95)

Positive emotions Happiness Good feelings about the self Pleasure Satisfaction Pride

2.33 (1.78) 2.24 (1.34) 2.62 (1.68) 2.29 (1.59) 1.96 (1.43)

5.50 (1.47) 5.50 (1.25) 5.39 (1.19) 5.61 (1.69) 4.89 (1.61)

4.60 (1.50) 4.60 (1.57) 4.30 (1.59) 4.65 (1.66) 3.80 (2.29)

overall higher scores for female participants (M = 35.43, SD = 15.38) than for male participants (M = 26.82, SD = 15.31). Because the participant gender distribution was equal across conditions, we did not include gender as an additional factor in subsequent analyses. 3.2. Manipulation checks The analysis yielded a significant multivariate effect of moral integrity (F[56,2] = 15.51, p < 0.001, p 2 = 0.37), which was qualified by a significant interaction between emotion and moral integrity; F(98, 12) = 3.58, p < 0.001, p 2 = 0.31. Compared to those in the affirmation or control condition, participants in the threat condition reported more guilt, disgust, shame, and bad feelings about the self (Fs > 12.57, ps < 0.003, p 2 s > 0.27), confirming that our moral threat manipulation specifically targeted participants’ negative moral emotions. Means for self-reported negative emotions did not differ significantly between the affirmation and control condition (ps > 0.244; see Table 1 for an overview of means and standard errors). A similar analysis including self-reported positive emotions yielded only a significant multivariate effect of moral integrity,

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Table 2 First fixations (mean percentage, SE) toward eye regions of angry, happy, and neutral facial expressions as a function of moral integrity condition (threat, affirmation, control) and low vs high social anxiety (estimated for respectively ± 1 SD from the overall mean of the standardized LSAS score). Facial expression

Angry Happy Neutral

Low socially anxious

High socially anxious

Threat

Affirmation

Control

Threat

Affirmation

Control

32 (8) 40 (9) 36 (8)

28 (8) 28 (9) 31 (8)

41 (8) 46 (9) 45 (8)

16 (8) 25 (9) 28 (9)

27 (7) 30 (8) 30 (8)

33 (8) 43 (9) 43 (8)

F(56, 2) = 24.30, p < 0.001, p 2 = 0.47. Participants in the affirmation condition reported more happiness, good feelings about the self, pleasure, satisfaction, and pride compared to those in the threat condition (p < 0.001), but not compared to the control condition (p = 0.11). Participants in the control condition still reported more intense positive emotions than participants in the threat condition (p < 0.001; see Table 1 for an overview of means and standard errors). Including social anxiety as an additional continuous betweenparticipants variable in the above analyses did not change the pattern of results. 3.3. Percentage of first fixations on eye region The analysis of percentages of first fixations on the eye region yielded a significant main effect of expression, F(56, 2) = 32.19, p < 0.001, p 2 = 0.38). Overall, participants spent a smaller percentage of their first fixations on the eyes of angry faces (M = 31%, SE = 3%) compared to happy faces (M = 37%, SE = 3%; p < 0.001), and neutral faces (M = 37%, SE = 3%; p < 0.001), whereas the percentage of first fixations between the latter two did not differ significantly (p > 0.85). There was also a marginally significant main effect of moral integrity, F(56, 2) = 3.08, p = 0.055, p 2 = 0.10. Participants first fixated more on the eyes of target faces presented in the control condition (M = 45%, SE = 5%) than following a moral threat (M = 30%, SE = 5%; p = 0.037), or moral affirmation (M = 30%, SE = 6%; p = 0.037), with no differences between the latter two conditions (p > 0.92). The main effects were qualified by a significant interaction between expression and moral integrity, F(54, 4) = 3.13, p = 0.02, p 2 = 0.13. Closer examination revealed a simple effect of expression in the moral threat condition, F(55, 2) = 16.55, p < 0.001, p 2 = 0.39. Participants fixated significantly less on the eyes of angry faces (M = 25%, SE = 5%), than on the eyes of happy faces (M = 34%, SE = 6%, p < 0.001) or neutral faces (M = 33%, SE = 5%, p < 0.001), whereas fixations on the latter two did not differ significantly (p = 0.70). Results showed a similar simple effect of facial expression in the control condition, F(55, 2) = 13.27, p < 0.001, p 2 = 0.34. Again, participants fixated significantly less on the eyes of angry faces (M = 37%, SE = 5%) than on the eyes of happy faces (M = 44%, SE = 6%, p < 0.001) or neutral faces (M = 44%, SE = 5%, p < 0.001), whereas fixations on the latter two did not differ (p = 0.89). In the moral affirmation condition, however, no simple effect of facial expression was observed, F(55, 2) = 1.17, p = 0.32, p 2 = 0.04. In this condition, participants fixated as often on the eyes of angry faces (M = 27%, SE = 6%) as those of happy faces (M = 29%, SE = 6%, p = 0.20), or neutral faces (M = 29%, SE = 6%, p = 0.14). Relevant means and standard errors are depicted in Fig. 1. The three-way interaction between facial expression, moral integrity, and social anxiety did not reach significance, F(54, 4) = 2.09, p = 0.09, p 2 = 0.08. Because we had specific hypotheses on the combined effects of our moral integrity manipulation and individual differences in social anxiety, we however examined this interaction further (see Enter et al., 2016; for a similar rationale). To this end, we estimated the effects of expression and moral integrity separately, for participants scoring relatively low (estimated at one

standard deviation below the standardized mean), and relatively high (estimated at one standard deviation above the standardized mean) on the LSAS scale (see Van Dillen et al., 2013; for a similar approach). For low socially anxious participants, this analysis yielded a significant interaction between facial expression and moral integrity, F(54, 4) = 3.58, p = 0.01, p 2 = 0.12. In the moral threat condition, results showed a significant simple effect of facial expression, F(56, 2) = 4.82, p = 0.01, p 2 = 0.17. Compared to neutral expressions, low socially anxious participants fixated significantly less on angry expressions (p = 0.001) and significantly more on happy expressions (p = 0.04). For the control condition, results showed a related pattern, that is, a significant multivariate simple effect of facial expression (F[56,2] = 3.68, p = 0.03, p 2 = 0.12), with low socially anxious participants fixating significantly more on the eye regions of angry expressions as compared to happy expressions (p = 0.02) or neutral expressions (p = 0.01), but this time with no significant differences in fixations between the latter two expressions (p = 0.89). For the moral affirmation condition, no significant simple effect of facial expression (F[56,2] = 1.54, p = 0.22, p 2 = 0.06) or significant differences between facial expressions for first fixations (ps > 0.20) were observed. For high socially anxious participants, results showed a marginally significant interaction between facial expression and moral integrity, F(56, 2) = 6.73, p = 0.055, p 2 = 0.12. As for the low socially anxious participants, there was a significant simple effect of facial expression in both the threat condition (F[56,2] = 16.55, p < 0.001, p 2 = 0.39) and control condition (F[56,2] = 13.27, p < 0.001, p 2 = 0.34). High socially anxious participants fixated significantly less on the eyes of angry expressions than on the eyes of happy (ps < 0.01) and neutral expressions (ps < 0.01), whereas fixations on the eyes of the latter two expressions did not differ (ps > 0.88). In the moral affirmation condition, again, no significant simple effect of facial expression (F[56,2] = 1.17, p = 0.32, p 2 = 0.04), or significant pairwise comparisons were observed (ps > 0.13). See Table 2 for an overview of relevant mean percentages and standard errors. 3.4. First fixation duration Analysis of the average duration of first fixations on the eyes AOI only yielded a significant main effect of expression; F(56, 2) = 17.06, p < 0.001, p 2 = 0.39. The duration of first fixations on angry eyes was significantly shorter (425 ms, SE = 22 ms) than first fixations on happy eyes (483 ms, SE = 27 ms, p < 0.01), which was still significantly shorter than first fixations on neutral eyes (546 ms, SE = 30 ms, p < 0.01). 3.5. Additional analyses of the gaze data In addition to the percentage of first fixations on the eye region, we also examined the percentage of total fixations on the eyes (i.e., during the entire stimulus duration), as well as the total duration of those fixations, as previous findings have documented effects of social anxiety in these components (Horley et al., 2004). For both

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components, these additional GLM analyses of variance yielded a similar pattern of findings, with participants fixating less, and for shorter durations, on the eyes of angry compared to happy and neutral faces, which was further enhanced for high compared to low socially anxious participants for the percentage of total number of fixations. An overview of these results can be found in the Supplementary materials.

4. Discussion Because people derive their sense of belonging from perceptions of being a moral person (Baumeister and Leary, 1995; Jordan et al., 2011), the present research examined the question whether reminding people of their past (im) moral behavior (versus a control memory) influenced the selective avoidance of eyes of threatening (angry) faces compared to neutral and accepting (happy) faces. In addition, we examined whether this tendency may vary with individual differences in social anxiety. In the control condition, when participants’ moral integrity was neither threatened or affirmed, our eye-tracking results pointed to the selective avoidance of social threat, with participants devoting a smaller percentage of first fixations to the eyes of angry faces compared to happy and neutral faces. This selective avoidance was moreover enhanced in the moral threat condition, confirming the idea that threats to people’s moral integrity make them more vigilant to cues of social rejection. When participants had just affirmed their moral integrity, however, the relative initial avoidance of the eye regions of angry compared to happy and neutral faces disappeared. Additional examinations of the effects of social anxiety, moreover, were in line with earlier findings (Becker and DetweilerBedell, 2009; Garner et al., 2006) that high socially anxious participants tend to avoid angry eyes more than low socially anxious participants, and, as expected, this difference was even more enhanced when their moral integrity was threatened. Interestingly, high socially anxious participants, too, showed a marked reduction in the selective avoidance of the eyes of angry faces following a moral affirmation. Together, these findings thus confirm our hypothesis that people adjust their social gaze behavior in response to threats and affirmations of their moral integrity. The finding that reminding people of their immoral past behavior enhanced selective avoidance of the eyes of angry faces, especially for high socially anxious individuals, suggests that the increased sensitivity to threatening faces can be explained, at least in part, by individuals’ negative assumptions about how other people see them (Staugaard, 2010). Our findings moreover showed that, following a moral integrity threat, highly anxious individuals not only displayed greater avoidance of the eyes of angry faces compared to neutral faces, but also, contrary to low anxious individuals, did not selectively increase their fixations on the eyes of happy (i.e., approving) faces, but, instead, tended to avoid these as well. This suggests that fear of evaluation in general is important in social anxiety, including fears of positive as well as negative evaluations (Roelofs et al., 2010; Weeks, Heimberg, Rodebaugh, & Norton, 2008). Our findings thus further support the notion that social anxiety is an exaggerated reaction to an otherwise functional response, that is, adjusting ones attention and behavior in response to others’ signs of rejection and acceptance in order to secure one’s standing within a group (Gilbert, 2000). In social anxiety, however, this perception is likely negatively biased, which might promote and maintain social anxiety, since negative expectations about other peoples’ reactions are not challenged (Clark and Wells, 1995) and opportunities to restore positive self-views, for example by focusing on social cues of acceptance (DeWall, Maner, & Rouby, 2009), are neglected.

4.1. Limitations and implications Whereas we found that participants no longer displayed selective avoidance of angry eye contact following a moral affirmation, in general, participants first fixated for a smaller percentage on the eyes of target faces in the moral affirmation condition compared to the control condition. This general decrease in selective fixations on the eye region may be interpreted in two ways. One possibility is that moral affirmations lead people to avoid social information altogether, because they try to maintain their positive self-perceptions, which is predicted by theories of self-defense (Sherman and Cohen, 2006). Another possibility is that people are simply less motivated to process social information when their moral integrity is affirmed, which is predicted by theories of moral licensing (Merritt, Effron & Monin, 2010). One finding that speaks to the latter interpretation is the absence of an increase in fixations to the eyes of happy faces, which has been observed following threats for social rejection (DeWall et al., 2009) and which should help maintain a positive self-image (DeWall et al., 2011). Note though, that although the pattern was in the expected direction, we did not observe a significant increase in self-reported positive emotions following a moral affirmation, which might indicate that this manipulation has been less effective. Future studies could combine measures of visual attention to social threat with more direct measures of affective responsivity, such as cortisol responses (Dickerson, Gruenewald, & Kemeny, 2004), skin conductance (Heeren, Reese, McNally, & Philippot, 2012), or facial EMG and ERP (Wiggert, Wilhelm, Reichenberger, & Blechert, 2015), to further examine whether, following a moral affirmation, people are actively avoiding social cues or are simply less responsive to them. Another limitation of the current research is that it has been conducted with a non-clinical sample. Although the range of social anxiety scores was sufficiently broad (Rytwinski et al., 2009), and the enhanced selective avoidance of threat for high socially anxious individuals is in line with earlier findings (Horley et al., 2004), it is unclear whether the current results extend to clinical Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) populations. In addition, due to extreme loss of tracking integrity, we were unable to include the data of twenty-two participants, which reduced the statistical power of the analyses, and which precludes strong conclusions about how the effects of our moral integrity manipulation and individual differences in social anxiety interact. Future replication studies with inclusion of a clinical SAD comparison group and larger samples could address these issues. Our current study suggests that people’s moral integrity moderates their first fixations on direct eye gazes of angry faces, providing further evidence for theories of social monitoring that suggest that people quickly screen their environment for possible signs of rejection or approval, in order to safeguard inclusion (e.g., Pickett et al., 2004). Social anxiety research, moreover, has demonstrated a link between the attentional avoidance of social threat cues and avoidance tendencies (Enter, Spinhoven, & Roelofs, 2014; Heuer, Rinck, & Becker, 2007; Roelofs et al., 2010). In a study by Roelofs et al. (2010), for example, socially anxious participants were faster to avoid (push the joystick) rather than approach (pull the joystick) in response to angry faces with direct gaze compared to averted gaze. Garner et al. (2006), moreover, showed that initial fixations to the eye-region are relevant not only for inferring others’ emotional expressions, but also for preparation of approach and avoidance behavior. A logical next step would be to examine how moral selfperceptions would affect actual behavioral avoidance tendencies. If moral integrity threats heighten selective avoidance of social threat cues, they should also enhance avoidant tendencies. If moral integrity affirmations, on the other hand, reduce such avoidant gaze strategies, they should also reduce avoidant tendencies.

Please cite this article in press as: Van Dillen, L. F., et al. Moral fixations: The role of moral integrity and social anxiety in the selective avoidance of social threat. Biol. Psychol. (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2016.01.016

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A more promising finding of our study therefore is that following a moral affirmation, more socially anxious participants no longer displayed selective avoidance of the eyes of angry faces. Whereas these findings clearly merit further examination, they resonate with recent findings on the effects of positive imagery on social anxiety (see Pictet, 2014; for an overview). In a study by Hulme, Hirsch, and Stopa (2012), for example, both high and low socially anxious participants who had held a positive image in mind reported higher levels of self-esteem after performing a social threat task than those who had retrieved a negative image. Other studies have had, however, less conclusive findings (e.g., Hirsch, Clark, Williams, Morrison, & Mathews, 2005), which might be explained by the greater difficulties that socially anxious individuals experience when generating positive self-images (Alden and Taylor, 2004; Kashdan, 2007; Weeks et al., 2008). Providing socially anxious individuals with more structured and concrete instructions, as in our moral affirmation manipulation, might help them retrieve such positive self-images more easily. Future research could examine this possibility further, preferably with clinical samples. 5. Conclusion By definition, any encounter between people occurs in a social context, and this context determines what cues people focus on (Van Dillen, Harris, Rotteveel, & van Dijk, 2015). Basing ourselves on theories of social monitoring (e.g., Pickett et al., 2004), moral integrity (e.g., Jordan et al., 2011), and social anxiety (e.g., Gilbert, 2000), we showed that people rapidly adjust their gaze behavior on the basis of their self-perceived moral standing. When experiencing a moral integrity threat, people tended to selectively avoid the eyes of angry faces more so than in a neutral state, whereas this tendency disappeared when they had just had the opportunity to affirm their moral integrity. The current findings thus further underline the importance of considering contextual factors when studying affective processing biases. Acknowledgements This research was supported by a grant (number 400-08-128) from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). We thank Stephen Brown and Thijs Schrama for their assistance during data analysis. Appendix A. Supplementary data Supplementary data associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2016. 01.016. References Alden, L. E., & Taylor, C. T. (2004). Interpersonal processes in social phobia. Clinical Psychological Review, 24, 857–882. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2004.07.006 American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Social anxiety disorder (social phobia), in: diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: DSM-V. pp. 202–208. Washington, D.C: American Psychiatric Association. Baron-Cohen, S., Wheelwright, S., & Jolliffe, T. (1997). Is there a language of the eyes? Evidence from normal adults, and adults with autism or Asperger syndrome. Visual Cognition, 4, 311–331. Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117, 497–529. Becker, M. W., & Detweiler-Bedell, B. (2009). Early detection and avoidance of threatening faces during passive viewing. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 62, 1257–1264. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17470210902725753 Bradley, M. M., Codispoti, M., Cuthbert, B. N., & Lang, P. J. (2001). Emotion and motivation I: defensive and appetitive reactions in picture processing. Emotion, 1, 276–298. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/1528-3542.1.3.276 Brambilla, M., Rusconi, P., Sacchi, S., & Cherubini, P. (2011). Looking for honesty: the primary role of morality (vs. sociability and competence) in information

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Please cite this article in press as: Van Dillen, L. F., et al. Moral fixations: The role of moral integrity and social anxiety in the selective avoidance of social threat. Biol. Psychol. (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2016.01.016