The memory structure of social anxiety disorder <Summaries of the Doctoral Theses>

Several theorists have argued that a pathological fear structure, formed on the basis of past experience, is a core factor in maintenance and treatment of the social anxiety. Although, fear structure is considered to be implicit associations which are out of awareness, examinations of the fear structure of social anxiety disorder have relied mainly on self-report measures. Therefore, this study investigated implicit associations in the fear structure of social anxiety disorder and examined the infl uences of implicit and explicit associations on maintenance and emotional processing of the social anxiety. We hypothesized that a high social anxiety group would show stronger implicit associations than a low social anxiety group. Also, the implicit association was assumed to uniquely predict to automatically initiated and involuntary symptoms, whereas the explicit association was assumed to uniquely predict to reflective and voluntary symptoms. With respect to the emotional processing of social anxiety, we hypothesized that implicit and explicit association changed independently. Results of this study supported the above hypotheses. Consequently, we proposed the maintenance and emotional processing model of social anxiety disorder. This model demonstrates that the implicit and explicit associations specifically function on both maintenance and emotional processing of social anxiety