A cued activation procedure was used to examine the hypothesis that social anxiety involves an expectation of being rejected or evaluated negatively by others, combined with a concern about impression management. Participants underwent a conditioning procedure in which distinctive computer tones were paired with thoughts of social rejection and acceptance, respectively. In a pilot study, a lexical decision task established that when these tone cues were played later, they differentially activated expectations of rejection. In the main study, female participants interacted with a male confederate while one of the tones, or a control tone, sounded repeatedly in the background. Several indicators of social anxiety showed an interaction between level of public self-consciousness and the nature of the tone played. High-self-conscious individuals tended to be affected by the cues, whereas low-self-conscious people were not affected.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Alden, L. E. , Teschuk, M., & Tee, K. (1992). Public self-awareness and withdrawal from social interactions. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 16, 249-267.
2.
Andersen, S. M. , & Berk, J. S. (1998). Transference in everyday experience: Implications of experimental research for relevant clinical phenomena. Review of General Psychology, 2, 81-120.
3.
Baldwin, M. W. (1992). Relational schemas and the processing of social information. Psychological Bulletin, 112, 461-484.
4.
Baldwin, M. W. (1994). Primed relational schemas as a source of self-evaluative reaction. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 13, 380-403.
5.
Baldwin, M. W. (1995). Relational schemas and cognition in close relationships. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 12, 547-552.
6.
Baldwin, M. W. , Carrell, S. E., & Lopez, D. F. (1990). Priming relation ship schemas: My advisor and the pope are watching me from the back of my mind. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 26, 435-454.
7.
Baldwin, M. W. , & Fergusson, P. (in press). Relational schemas: The activation of interpersonal knowledge structures in social anxiety. In R. Crozier & L. Alden (Eds.), International handbook of social anxiety. Sussex, UK: Wiley.
8.
Baldwin, M. W. , Granzberg, A., Pippus, L., & Pritchard, E. T. (2001). Cued activation of relational schemas: Self-evaluation and gender effects. Manuscript submitted for publication.
9.
Baldwin, M. W. , & Holmes, J. C. (1987). Salient private audiences and awareness of the self. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 1087-1098.
10.
Baldwin, M. W. , Keelan, J. P. R., Fehr, B., Enns, V., & Koh-Rangarajoo, E. (1996). Social cognitive conceptualization of attachment working models: Availability and accessibility effects. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71, 94-104.
11.
Baldwin, M. W. , & Meunier, J. (1999). The cued activation of attachment relational schemas. Social Cognition, 17, 209-227.
12.
Baldwin, M. W. , & Sinclair, L. (1996). Self-esteem and “if... then” contingencies of interpersonal acceptance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71, 1130-1141.
13.
Bargh, J. A. , & Ferguson, M. J. (2000). Beyond behaviorism: On the automaticity of higher mental processes. Psychological Bulletin, 126, 925-945.
14.
Bolles, R. C. (1972). Reinforcement, expectancy, and learning. Psychological Review, 95, 394-409.
15.
Bouton, M. E. (1991). A contextual analysis of fear extinction. In P. R. Martin (Ed.), Handbook of behavior therapy and psychological science (pp. 435-453). New York: Pergamon.
16.
Brewin, C. R. (1989). Cognitive change processes in psychotherapy. Psychological Review, 96, 379-394.
17.
Burgio, K. L. , Merluzzi, T. V., & Pryor, J. B. (1986). Effects of performance expectancy and self-focused attention on social interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 1216-1221.
18.
Clark, M. S. , & Reis, H. T. (1988). Interpersonal processes in close relationships. Annual Review of Psychology, 39, 609-672.
19.
DePaulo, B. M. , Epstein, J. A., & LeMay, C. S. (1990). Responses of the socially anxious to the prospect of interpersonal evaluation. Journal of Personality, 58, 623-640.
20.
Dickinson, A. (1989). Expectancy theory in animal conditioning. In S. Klein & R. R. Mowrer (Eds.), Contemporary learning theories: Pavlovian conditioning and the status of traditional learning theory (pp. 279-308). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
21.
Edelmann, R. J. (1992). Anxiety: Theory, research and intervention in psychology. West Sussex, UK: Wiley.
22.
Eysenck, H. J. (1965). Extraversion and the acquisition of eye blink and GSR conditioned responses. Psychological Bulletin, 63, 258-270.
23.
Fazio, R. H. , Sanbonmatsu, D. M., Powell, M. C., & Kardes, F. R. (1986). On automatic activation of attitudes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 229-238.
24.
Fenigstein, A. (1979). Self-consciousness, self-attention, and social interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 75-86.
25.
Fenigstein, A. , Scheier, M. F., & Buss, A. H. (1975). Public and private self-consciousness: Assessment and theory. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 43, 522-527.
26.
Fiske, A. P. , & Haslam, N. (1996). Social cognition is thinking about relationships. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 143-148.
27.
Greenwald, A. G. , McGhee, D. E., Schwartz, J. L. K. (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The implicit association test. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 74, 1464-1480.
28.
Hartmann, L. M. (1983). A metacognitive model of social anxiety: Implications for treatment. Clinical Psychological Review, 3, 435-456.
29.
Heatherton, T. F. , & Polivy, J. (1991). Development and validation of a scale for measuring state self-esteem. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60, 895-910.
30.
Heimberg, R. G. , & Barlow, D. H. (1991). New developments in cognitive-behavioral therapy for social phobia. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 52, 21-29.
31.
Higgins, E. T. (1987). Self-discrepancy: A theory relating self and affect. Psychological Review, 94, 319-340.
32.
Hope, D. A. , & Heimberg, R. G. (1988). Public and private self-consciousness and social phobia. Journal of Personality Assessment, 52, 626-639.
33.
Ingram, R. E. , & Kendall, P. C. (1987). The cognitive side of anxiety. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 11, 523-536.
34.
Krosnick, J. A. , Betz, A. L., Jussim, L. J., & Lynn, A. R. (1992). Subliminal conditioning of attitudes. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 18, 152-162.
35.
Leary, M. R. , & Kowalski, R. M. (1995). Social anxiety. New York: Guilford.
36.
McFarland, C. , & Ross, M. (1982). Impact of causal attributions on affective reactions to success and failure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 43, 937-946.
37.
Melchoir, L. A. , & Cheek, J. M. (1990). Shyness and anxious self-presentation during a social interaction [Special issue: Communication, cognition, and anxiety]. Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, 5, 117-130.
38.
Meyer, D. , & Schvaneveldt, R. W. (1971). Facilitation in recognizing pairs of words: Evidence of a dependence between retrieval operations. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 90, 227-234.
39.
Mikulincer, M. , & Arad, D. (1999). Attachment working models and cognitive openness in close relationships: A test of chronic and temporary accessibility effects. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 77, 710-725.
40.
Murphy, S. T. , & Zajonc, R. B. (1993). Affect, cognition, and awareness: Affective priming with optimal and suboptimal stimulus exposures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64, 723-739.
41.
Pozo, C. , Carver, C. S., Wellens, A. R., & Scheier, M. F. (1991). Social anxiety and social perception: Construing others’ reactions to the self. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 17, 355-362.
42.
Rogers, C. R. (1959). Therapy, personality and interpersonal relationships. In S. Koch (Ed.), Psychology: A study of a science (Vol. 3). Toronto, Canada: McGraw-Hill.
43.
Ryan, R. M. , Plant, R. W., & Kuczkowski, R. J. (1991). Relation of self-projection processes to perform, emotion, and memory in a controlled interaction setting. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 17, 427-434.
44.
Safran, J. D. (1990). Towards a refinement of cognitive therapy in light of interpersonal theory: I. Theory. Clinical Psychology Review, 10, 87-103.
45.
Schlenker, B. R. , & Leary, M. R. (1982). Social anxiety and self-presentation: A conceptualization and model. Psychological Bulletin, 92, 641-669.
46.
Seligman, M. , & Binik, Y. (1977). The safety signal hypothesis. In H. Davis & H. Hurwitz (Ed.), Pavlovian-operant interactions (pp. 165-187). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
47.
Stopa, L. , & Clark, D. N. (1993). Cognitive processes in social phobia. Behavior Research and Therapy, 31, 255-267.
48.
Sullivan, H. S. (1953). The interpersonal theory of psychiatry. New York: Norton.
49.
Taylor, C. B. , & Arnow, B. (1988). The nature and treatment of anxiety disorders. New York: Free Press.
50.
Tolman, E. C. (1932). Purposive behavior in animals and men. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
51.
Wallace, S. T. , & Alden, L. E. (1991). A comparison of social standards and perceived ability in anxious and nonanxious men. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 15, 237-254.
52.
Watson, D. , Clark, L. A., & Tellegen, A. (1988). Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS Scale. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 1063-1070.
53.
Wenar, C. (1954). Reaction time as a function of manifest anxiety and stimulus intensity. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 49, 335-340.
54.
Wicklund, R. A. (1975). Objective self-awareness. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 8, pp. 233-275). New York: Academic Press.
55.
Winton, E. C. , Clark, D., & Edelmann, R. J. (1995). Social anxiety, fear of negative evaluation and the detection of negative emotion in others. Behavior Research and Therapy, 33, 193-196.
56.
Zinbarg, R. E. , & Mohlman, J. (1998). Individual differences in the acquisition of affectively valenced associations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1024-1040.
57.
Zuckerman, M. , & Lubin, B. (1965). The multiple affect adjective check list. San Diego, CA: Educational and Industrial Testing Service.
