Date of Award

11-16-2006

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Alan King

Abstract

Cognitive theory attributes social anxiety to a host of perceptual biases that transform harmless interpersonal stimuli into threats. Socially anxious college students were expected to misinterpret visual and auditory cues of emotion in others more readily than their more confident counterparts. This group of socially anxious men and women were also expected to perceive negative emotion from visual and auditory cues that were determined to be neutral or positive through an external validation process. A total of 16 participants were assigned into each of the four cells of this 2 (gender) by 2 (Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale-Self Report median split) between group design. Participants completed a visual (i.e., Pictures of Facial Affect) and auditory (i.e., Aprosodia Battery) emotion recognition task. The social anxiety levels failed to predict differences in perceiving emotions on the visual and auditory recognition tasks. Grouping emotions into non-threatening, negative, and threatening emotion clusters also failed to show a relationship with social anxiety levels. Women were more accurate than men in perceiving visual presentations of happy, anger, neutral, and disgust, and auditory presentations of happy and surprise. Participants with higher social anxiety levels had higher Beck Depression Inventory-II scores, and participants with lower social anxiety levels had higher levels of repression on the revised Repression-Sensitization Scale. Emotion perceptual accuracy was not a significant predictor of social anxiety in this sample of college students. These results would appear to pose challenges to cognitive bias explanations for the genesis and maintenance of social anxiety.

Download

Share

COinS