The effects of social evaluation and looming threat on self-attentional biases and social anxiety

This paper examines how two proposed cognitive vulnerabilities of social anxiety, the fear of negative evaluation, and looming cognitive style may combine with socially demanding situations in predicting social anxiety symptoms and performance deficits. Fifty-two individuals previously identified as possessing these two cognitive vulnerabilities were randomly assigned to conditions in a 2 (high versus low social evaluation) × 2 (high versus low temporal looming) experimental design. Significant interaction effects were found for: (a) residual change in anxiety symptoms from baseline level, and (b) performance on a speech task. Specifically, cognitively at-risk individuals exhibited the most increase in anxiety and the most performance deficits in the condition where social evaluation and temporal looming were high. In addition, a mediational effect of illusion of transparency (a form of self-attentional bias) between situational demands and residual change in anxiety was found. Implications arising from these results are discussed.