High social anxiety is associated with attenuated cognitive-control modulation in a mixed threat–neutral context: evidence from ERPs and time-frequency analysis

High social anxiety has been linked to impaired attentional control, yet its influence on stimulus-sensitive cognitive-control modulation in mixed threat-neutral contexts remains unclear. The present study examined cognitive-control-related behavioral and neural processing in individuals with high social anxiety (HSA) during an emotional Stroop task in which neutral and social threat words were randomly intermixed. Behaviorally, the HSA group responded more slowly than the low social anxiety (LSA) group, despite comparable accuracy across groups and conditions. In addition, responses to threat words were faster than those to neutral words across groups. At the neural level, neutral words elicited larger N2 and N450 amplitudes than threat words, and these differentiation effects were more pronounced in the LSA group than in the HSA group. Likewise, the LSA group showed clearer late-stage modulation in SP, whereas this effect was attenuated in the HSA group. In the time-frequency domain, theta power was stronger in the LSA group than in the HSA group, and neutral words elicited stronger alpha desynchronization than threat words in the HSA group. Taken together, these findings suggest that HSA is associated with reduced processing efficiency and attenuated stimulus-sensitive cognitive-control modulation in a mixed threat-neutral context.