The Influence of Interpretation Bias on Future Thinking in Individuals with High Social Anxiety

• Main Authors: Cheng-Yu Chang, 張承瑀
• Other Authors: Chi-Wen Liang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2017
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/3m3s9r

碩士 === 中原大學 === 心理學研究所 === 105 === Objective: Cognitive-behavioral models of social anxiety disorder indicate that high socially anxious individuals demonstrate several types of cognitive biases during information processing. Social information is often ambiguous, since social anxiety individuals detect these threatening information, they will interpret in a negative fashion. It might promote individuals’ anxiety, and affect later cognitive processing. Furthermore, previous studies have shown that highly socially anxious people have some biases on phenomenological characteristics when they imagine future event, such as more self-referential information, from an observer perspective and much more negative than low social anxiety individuals. These characteristics of future thinking could lead social anxiety individuals to avoid the social situation; or influence their performance in social situation. According to cognitive-behavioral models and combined cognitive biases hypothesis, congnitive biases have been assumed to operate simultaneously and (or) in succession and work together to maintain social anxiety disorders. Modifying one of the cognitive bias could impact the other cognitive bias, and influence the severity of social anxiety. The recent studies indicated that negative interpretation bias would influence memory of social event in socially anxious individuals, and future thinking was affected by memory. We supposed that negative interpretation bias would affect future thinking via memory. Modifying high social anxiety individuals negative interpretation bias might reduced negative memory bias and changed the characteristics of future thinking. The present study has two main purposes. First, to examine the effect of a computerized Interpretation Modification Program (IMP) on interpretation bias and social anxiety. Second, to investigate the influence of interpretation bias on future thinking in high socially anxious individuals. Method: In this study, sixty high socially anxious undergraduate students were randomly assigned to IMP or a control group (ICC). Participants completed four sessions of IMP or ICC over two weeks. Participants were also required to complete preassessments and postassessments including BFNE, SIAS, SPS, STAI-Trait, BDI-II, IJQ, Future Thinking Task and MCQ. Results: The results showed that IMP sussessfully increased participants’ benign interpretations but had no effect on negative interpretation bias. We failed to observe the effects of IMP on the degree of social anxiety, trait anxiety or depression. In addition, correlation analysis results indicate that higher social axiety level, more lack of benign interpretation bias and more ngative interpretation bias, high socially axious participants tended to envision more negative when they imagined future events. Nevertheless, our results showed that increased benign interpretation bias didn’t change the characteristics of future thinking. Conclusions: The IMP successfully increased high soically anxious individual’s benign interpretations. Furthermore, modify social anxiety individual’s interpretation bias didn’t influence their characteristics of future thinking.