Psychotherapy Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Psychotherapy, including details on psychiatry, psychoanalysis, methods, outcomes.

Fear-relevant selective associations and social anxiety: absence of a positive bias.

Garner M, Mogg K, Bradley BP

Centre for the Study of Emotion and Motivation, School of Psychology, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK. m.j.garner@soton.ac.uk

An illusory correlation paradigm was used to compare high and low socially anxious individuals' initial, on-line and a posteriori covariation estimates between emotional faces and aversive, pleasant and neutral outcomes. Overall, participants demonstrated an initial expectancy bias for aversive outcomes following angry faces, and pleasant outcomes following happy faces. On-line expectancy biases indicated that initial biases were extinguished during the task, with the exception of low socially anxious individuals who continued to over-associate positive social cues with pleasant outcomes. In addition to lacking this protective positive on-line bias, the high social anxiety group reported retrospectively more negative social cues than the low socially anxious group. Findings are discussed in relation to similar evidence from recent interpretive and memory paradigms.

Published 3 January 2006 in Behav Res Ther, 44(2): 201-17.
Full-text of this article is available online (may require subscription).

© 2005-2008 Psychotherapy Research Today. All Rights Reserved.