| Summary: | 碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 臨床心理學系碩士班 === 101 === Background and purpose: According to the social anxiety cognitive behavioral model, socially anxious individuals (SAIs) in social situations will preferentially allocate attentional resources either toward detecting social threats in their environment or internal self-discrepancy (Heimberg, et al., 2010). Also, it has been found that the inhibition difficulties SAIs experience may be due to their difficulties in disengaging attention from social threat (Cisler & Koster, 2010), which in turn leads to the trigger and maintenance of social anxiety. However, at present there has been a lack of reliable and valid of domestic self-discrepancy measurement tools, and insufficient research directly investigating the relation between self-discrepancy and social anxiety. Furthermore, results of past studies involving attention, responses to threats, and social anxiety are inconsistent, perhaps due to ineffective stimuli (Amir & Bomyea, 2010). Thus, this study introduces the concept of self-discrepancy to define new threat words, and explores the attention bias and inhibition processes of high and low socially anxious individuals with the use of idiographic experiment materials. Methods: In the first stage, a revision of the Integrated Self-Discrepancy Index (ISDI) was completed. A non-clinical sample of 307 college students completed the revised ISDI, Social Avoidance and Distress Scale (SAD), Fear of Negative Evaluation Scale (FNE), Social Interaction Anxiety Scale (SIAS), Social Phobia Scale (SPS), Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II), the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D), and also a word list to filter the idiographic experiment materials. Sixty participants were selected into the second stage and divided into two groups, high and low social anxiety. After being triggered into a condition of social threat with an autobiographical memory task, participants were asked to complete the dot-probe task and the negative priming task, during which they completed the Situation Feeling Scale to monitor situation anxiety. Results: (1) Internal reliability of the revised ISDI was acceptable (Cronbach's α = .59 ~ .80); both ideal self-discrepancy (ideal SD) and ought self-discrepancy (ought SD) could predict social anxiety, ought SD could predict depression after controlling for social anxiety and ideal SD, and ideal SD could still predict social anxiety after control depression and ought SD. (2) In the evaluative word attentional experiment, conditions were divided into social threat and non-social due to significantly different scores on the Situation Feeling Scale. (3) In the attentional bias experiment, under the non-social threat condition, the high social anxiety group (HSA) had more attentional biases toward non-social threat words than the low social anxiety group (LSA), and also the HSA group had more attentional biases toward non-social threat words than toward social threat words. Under the social threat condition, the HSA group had more attentional biases toward social threat words than non-social threat words, and the HSA group had more attentional biases toward social threat words under the social threat condition than the non-social threat condition. (4) In the attentional inhibition experiment, when the prime was a threat word, the HAS group showed worse inhibition than the LSA group; the LSA group showed better inhibition to threat words when the prime was a threat word than a non-threat word, but the HSA group did not. Discussion: The revise ISDI had acceptable reliability and validity, and social anxiety positively correlated to self-discrepancy. Individuals with high social anxiety had more internal self-discrepancies. Individuals with high social anxiety may have more attentional biases toward threat words and worse ability to inhibit threat words than individuals with low social anxiety. These findings are consistent with the arguments of Heimberg et. al. (2010) and Cisler & Koster (2010). Implications of the present findings and future research possibilities are discussed.
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