Emily A. Rancorn¹ (), Bradley E. Buchanan¹, Liana Y. Thielecke¹, Bryce C. Romero¹, Emma Sonenblum¹, Connor Murray¹, Geoffrey F. Potts¹; ¹University of South Florida

Rejection Sensitivity (RS) is a personality trait linked to maladaptive responses to rejection and is present in various anxiety disorders, such as Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD). Individuals displaying RS, along with those diagnosed with SAD, show biases in selective attention and attentional control by primarily displaying bias towards salient social stimuli, such as faces. Perceptual Load Theory suggests that selective attention may be influenced by the amount of attentional resources needed for a task. Previous literature shows that the ability to selectively attend is reduced with heightened perceptual load. Perceptual load has been shown to affect this bias in SAD – however, previous studies have shown that perceptual load has no effect on this selective attention bias in Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD). Given RS is a predictor of SAD, perceptual load should impact this selective attention bias within RS. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs), described as insightful measures of cortical activity, have been shown to be representative of covert cognitive processes such as selective attention. The P3b is a posterior maximal positive deflection at 300-500 ms post-stimulus presentation and is described as an index of attention resource allocation. A sample of 86 undergraduate students were examined using a visual search task to explore electrophysiological indices (ERPs) of perceptual load effects on selective attention within individuals with high self-reported RS traits. Participants were asked to locate a target letter in low or high perceptual load conditions in which a task-irrelevant neutral or scrambled facial image appeared at fixation. Bayesian linear mixed-effect models reveal that while perceptual load and RS impact P3b amplitudes independently, there is no interaction between RS and perceptual load. This suggests that trait RS attentional systems may map onto GAD more than they do SAD. Further literature should explore how trait RS’s attentional systems are socially impacted.