Cognitive biases in social phobia.

Abstract: Social phobia involves a persistent fear of negative evaluation by others and is associated with significant functional impairment. This contribution presents an introduction to the various cognitive processes (i.e., ways of thinking) that contribute to the maintenance of social phobia. The following areas of cognitive processing are discussed: attention; interpretation; memory; and imagery. Individuals with social phobia exhibit increased attention to potentially threatening social information. They also tend to interpret ambiguous social information as negative and fail to generate positive interpretations of social information. Initial research regarding memory processes suggests that people with social phobia exhibit increased memory for information that is related to negative evaluation from others and to negative self-related information. Negative self-imagery is often evoked in social situations. Such imagery has been associated with increased anxiety and poorer performance in social situations. The spontaneous imagery of people with social phobia is not simply negative in nature but is also viewed from the observer perspective; in other words, it comprises constructed images of the person as he or she may appear to others. Finally, support is emerging for the combined cognitive bias hypothesis, which proposes that these various cognitive biases do not work in isolation but rather combine and amplify the effects of each on social anxiety. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]