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Cogn Ther Res (2009) 33:406415
DOI 10.1007/s10608-009-9235-0
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Interpretation in Social Anxiety: When Meaning Precedes Ambiguity
Courtney Beard Nader Amir
Published online: 13 February 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2009
Abstract Cognitive models of anxiety posit that negative beliefs inuence socially anxious individuals interpretation of ambiguous social cues. However, paradigms used to assess interpretation bias in social anxiety have not addressed such beliefs. Furthermore, studies have assessed interpretation with either self-report or reaction time paradigms, rather than using both methods. In the current study, socially anxious and non-anxious participants completed the Word Sentence Association Paradigm (WSAP). In the WSAP, participants decide whether or not a word (implying a threat or benign interpretation) is related to an ambiguous sentence. Threat or benign meanings preceded the ambiguity in order to examine the inuence of positive and negative beliefs on interpretation of ambiguous information. The WSAP results in two types of interpretation indices: (1) response latency to make relatedness decisions for threat and benign interpretations, and (2) endorsement rates of the relatedness of threat and benign interpretations to ambiguous sentences. Results revealed a threat interpretation bias and a lack of a benign interpretation bias in both reaction time and self-report data. Threat and benign biases were not strongly correlated. These ndings support the distinction between threat and benign interpretation biases.
Keywords Interpretation bias Social anxiety
Information processing
Introduction
Cognitive models of social anxiety posit that the interpretation of ambiguous information as threatening maintains anxiety (e.g., Clark and Wells 1995; Rapee and Heimberg 1997). An interpretation bias for ambiguous information may be especially harmful to individuals with social anxiety because social cues are often ambiguous and thus easily distorted (Clark and Wells 1995). For example, it is difcult to know if a conversation partners yawn indicates boredom (threat interpretation) or exhaustion (benign interpretation). The cognitive models suggest that socially anxious (SA) individuals rely on pre-existing negative beliefs to resolve ambiguous social cues. For example, a SA individual may enter a party with the negative belief (e.g., I am boring). That individual is then primed to interpret the yawn of a conversation partner as indicative of him or her as being boring, rather than the partners exhaustion.
Given the proposed inuence of negative beliefs on interpretation, it is surprising...