The impact of self-focused attention on social anxiety

Cognitive models of social phobia, propose that on entering a social situation individuals with social phobia become self-focused and use internal processing to generate a negative impression of their public self (Clark & Wells, 1995; Heimberg, 1997). This impression takes the form of a felt sense or a visual image, often seen from an observer perspective. This impression is used to infer self-image and as it is usually distorted increases anxiety and impacts on evaluation of performance. Research supports the contention that self-focused attention has a negative impact on thinking, anxiety and evaluation of performance, and that socially anxious individuals experience negative self-images, seen from an observer perspective, particularly in high anxiety producing social situations. The current study tested the effects of self-focused attention on perspective taking, mental representations of the self, anxiety, shame, and evaluation of performance, with high and low socially anxious individuals in a social and a non-social task. The results indicate that high socially anxious participants reported more negative images and worse evaluation of performance than low socially anxious participants, however there was no difference in perspective taking, anxiety and shame between the groups in the social task. All participants spent a greater proportion of time in the observer perspective, reported more anxiety and shame and underrated their performance in the social task. Results partially support the cognitive models hypotheses; however it was demonstrated that for some variables self-focused attention has a causal effect in social anxiety irrespective of anxiety status.