title: How do I appear to others? Social anxiety and processing of the observable self.
abstract: Two information processing biases that could maintain social anxiety were investigated. High and low socially anxious individuals encoded positive and negative trait words in one of three ways: public self-referent, private self-referent, and other-referent. Half were then told they would soon have to give a speech. As predicted, compared to low socially anxious individuals, high socially anxious individuals recalled less positive public self-referent words, but only when both groups were anticipating giving a speech. No memory biases were observed for private self-referent or other-referent words. Next all participants gave a speech. Correlational analyses suggested that high socially anxious individuals may use the somatic concomitants of anxiety to overestimate how anxious they appear and underestimate how well they come across.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, Warneford Hospital, UK. warren.mansell@psychiatry.ox.ac.uk
authors.forename: W
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Mansell
authors.forename: D M
authors.initials: DM
authors.lastname: Clark
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001007:Anxiety / Q000503:physiopathology / Q000523:psychology; D015444:Exercise / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006339:Heart Rate / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology; D010551:Personality / Q000502:physiology; D012647:Self-Assessment; D012660:Semantics; D012677:Sensation / Q000502:physiology*; D012919:Social Behavior; D012938:Social Perception; D014706:Verbal Learning / Q000502:physiology*