Blushing-fearful individuals overestimate the costs and probability of their blushing.
It has been proposed that blushing-fearful individuals overestimate both the probability and the interpersonal costs of blushing. To study these judgmental biases, we presented a treatment-seeking sample of blushing-fearful individuals a series of vignettes describing social events and tested whether this clinical sample would overestimate the costs and probability of blushing compared to non-fearful controls. To test if blushing-fearfuls overestimate and/or low-fearful individuals underestimate the cost of displaying a blush, a second experiment examined the effects of blushing in these situations on observers' judgments. Experiment 1 showed that blushing-fearfuls indeed have judgmental biases for the probability and costs of blushing. Experiment 2 showed that the observers' judgments were very similar to the judgments anticipated by the low-fear group in Experiment 1. Thus the judgmental biases that were evident in the high-fearfuls can be best interpreted as an overestimation of the social costs of displaying a blush. These findings help improving our understanding of the mechanisms that may drive blushing phobia and also point to the clinical implication that it might be worthwhile to challenge blushing-fearfuls' judgmental biases.
Department of Clinical Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Weesperplein 4, 1018 XA, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. K.F.L.Dijk@uva.nl
Corine
C
Dijk
Peter J
PJ
de Jong
D000328:Adult; D001821:Blushing / Q000523:psychology*; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D010698:Phobic Disorders / Q000523:psychology*; D011336:Probability; D012919:Social Behavior