Suppression of Interpretative Bias After Mood Induction in Socially Anxious Individuals

Cognitive biases have been the focus of study in experimental psychopathology for years. Individuals with increased fears, anxiety or depression have shown a bias for threat relevant information. Recently, however, three studies have found the opposite result when individuals high in fear or anxiety are further stressed. Increased anxiety in these subjects tends to reduce attentional bias. The purpose of the present study was to investigate if the suppression of cognitive bias is characteristic of clinical populations only, by testing a non-clinical socially anxious student sample. The second purpose of this study was to investigate whether interpretation biases would produce similar results to the attentional bias. A sample of students from a small urban university were randomly assigned to two conditions, socially anxious condition and a neutral condition. Subjects in the socially anxious condition were asked to give a speech to the class about their hometown, subjects in the neutral condition were asked to write a paragraph about their hometown. Subjects were then asked to complete a homograph task with both neutral and social threat interpretations. Homographs are words that are spelled the same but have more than one meaning. Subjects were asked to write the first word that came to mind upon reading each of the homographs. For example, the homograph "odd" could yield a social threat interpretation such a "weird" or a neutral interpretation such as "even". Subjects were grouped into high socially anxious and low socially anxious groups using a median split of scores on a social anxiety scale. Results revealed only a significant main effect for interpretation bias such that subjects high in social anxiety scores produced more threat interpretations. Exploratory follow-up analyses, however, found a significant interaction between condition and social anxiety such that individuals high in social anxiety upon mood induction produced a suppression of interpretation bias. Based on these results, it was suggested that there appears to be a suppression of interpretative bias in socially anxious individuals.