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Adults’ recollections of how often they were teased as children are positively associated with their social anxiety symptoms. It has therefore been suggested that childhood teasing may play a role in the development of social anxiety disorder (SAD). However, existing studies have not determined whether adults with SAD were actually teased more as children or whether their current symptoms have distorted their memories of childhood events. This study examined reports of childhood teasing in adults with SAD before and after cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). If recollections of childhood teasing are colored by SAD symptoms, then reported frequency of teasing might be more likely to decrease as symptoms improve after CBT. However, if individuals’ memories of teasing are unbiased, they should not substantially change with the reduction of symptoms after CBT. Ninety-one participants with SAD completed the Teasing Questionnaire-Revised (TQ-R) before and after 12 sessions of group CBT. CBT was effective in reducing SAD symptoms, whereas recollections of the frequency of childhood teasing did not change significantly after treatment. These results are consistent with the possibility that recollections of childhood teasing are not substantially biased by symptoms of SAD, and they lend support to previous studies which suggest that adults with SAD endured higher frequencies of teasing as children compared to controls.

In one of the few studies examining working memory processes in social anxiety disorder (SAD), Amir and Bomyea (2011) recruited participants with and without SAD to complete a working memory span task with neutral and social threat words. Those with SAD showed better working memory performance for social threat words compared to neutral words, suggesting an enhancement in processing efficiency for socially threatening information in SAD. The current study sought to replicate and extend these findings. In this study, 25 participants with a principal diagnosis of SAD, 24 anxious control (AC) participants with anxiety disorders other than SAD, and 27 healthy control (HC) participants with no anxiety disorder completed a working memory task with social threat, general threat, and neutral stimuli. The groups in the current study demonstrated similar working memory performance within each of the word type conditions, thus failing to replicate the principal findings of Amir and Bomyea (2011). Post hoc analyses revealed a significant association between higher levels of anxiety symptomatology and poorer overall WM performance. These results inform our understanding of working memory in the anxiety disorders and support the importance of replication in psychological research. (PsycINFO Database Record

High-quality research in clinical psychology often depends on recruiting adequate samples of clinical participants with formally diagnosed difficulties. This challenge is readily met within the context of a large treatment center, but many clinical researchers work in academic settings that do not feature a medical school, hospital connections, or an in-house clinic. This article describes the model we developed at the University of Waterloo Centre for Mental Health Research for identifying and recruiting large samples of people from local communities with diagnosable mental health problems who are willing to participate in research but for whom treatment services are not offered. We compare the diagnostic composition, symptom profile, and demographic characteristics of our participants with treatment-seeking samples recruited from large Canadian and American treatment centers. We conclude that the Anxiety Studies Division model represents a viable and valuable method for recruiting clinical participants from the community for psychopathology research.

In a study designed to clarify and extend previous research on social blunders in social anxiety, 32 participants with social anxiety disorder (SAD), 25 anxious control (AC) participants with anxiety disorders other than SAD, and 25 healthy control (HC) participants with no history of anxiety problems estimated the costs of hypothetical blunders committed by either themselves or by others. Participants with SAD rated the costs of their own imagined blunders as highly inflated relative to both AC and HC participants. In contrast, for blunders participants imagined others committing, only SAD and healthy control participants' cost estimates differed from one another. Moreover, concerns about revealing self-flaws--and, in particular, about appearing socially incompetent--accounted for significant, unique variance in SAD participants' exaggerated cost estimates of self blunders, over and above symptoms of social anxiety and depression. These results enhance our understanding of how and why socially anxious individuals negatively appraise social blunders and help to clarify the potential function and role of social mishap exposures in the treatment of SAD.

Attentional biases to threat are thought to play a central role in the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders. Various measures have been developed to index these biases; unfortunately, the psychometric properties of response time measures of attentional bias have not been thoroughly evaluated, and the reliability of those that have been evaluated is poor. The current study assessed the reliability and convergent validity of dot probe and emotional cueing bias scores in high-anxious and low-anxious participants in the context of a state anxiety manipulation to increase the likelihood of producing large, potentially reliable attentional biases. One hundred sixty participants completed an anxious or calm mood induction followed by dot probe and emotional cueing tasks. Reliability estimates for bias scores in the full sample were low, ranging from 0 to .44; convergent validity estimates were also poor. The anxiety induction did not substantially improve the reliability or validity of the measures. These results underscore the importance of developing new, more reliable attentional bias measures for future research.

Forty participants with social anxiety disorder (SAD) and 42 healthy controls (HCs) were randomized to watch a confederate deliver a speech in either a visibly anxious or confident manner. Participants rated their perception of the presenter's desirability across five attributes and compared themselves to the presenter along these same dimensions. Participants then delivered their own speeches, and were rated in a similar manner by trained research assistants who were naive to participants' group status and study objectives. Results demonstrated that all participants, irrespective of group status, judged the visibly anxious presenter as being less desirable and the confident presenter as more desirable. Socially anxious participants tended to view themselves as inferior to confident others. Coders also rated participants with SAD, based on their speeches, as being less interpersonally desirable than HCs. These results suggest that individuals who appear visibly anxious may be objectively disadvantaged in their ability to make a positive first impression on others. We discuss these findings in relation to theoretical models of social anxiety and explore how to address such interpersonal factors in psychological interventions for SAD.

article i nfo Decades of research have demonstrated that women experience higher rates of math anxiety - that is, neg- ative affect when performing tasks involving numerical and mathematical skill - than men. Researchers have largely attributed this sex difference in math anxiety to factors such as social stereotypes and propensity to report anxiety. Here we provide the first evidence that the sex difference in math anxiety may be due in part to sex differences in spatial processing ability. In Study 1, undergraduate students completed question- naires assessing their level of math anxiety and their aptitude and preference for processing spatial configu- rations and schematic images. The results support the hypothesis that the relation between sex and math anxiety is mediated by spatial processing ability. In Study 2, we replicate these results with a more diverse sample of adults. Implications for the prevention and remediation of math anxiety and math anxiety- related achievement deficits are discussed.

Repetition priming is one of the most robust phenomena in cognitive psychology, but participants vary substantially on the amount of priming that they produce. The current experiments assessed the reliability of repetition priming within individuals. The results suggest that observed differences in the size of the repetition priming effect across participants are largely reliable and result primarily from systematic processes. We conclude that the unreliability of semantic priming observed by Stolz, Besner, and Carr (2005) is specific to uncoordinated processes in semantic memory, and that this unreliability does not generalize to other processes in visual word recognition. We consider the implications of these results for theories of automatic and controlled processes that contribute to priming. Finally, we emphasize the importance of reliability for researchers who use similar paradigms to study individual and group differences in cognition.