a Department of Psychology and Centre for Mental Health Research , University of Waterloo , Waterloo , Canada.
b Department of Psychology , Ryerson University , Toronto , Canada.
Anxiety Stress Coping. 2018 Sep;31(5):487-499. doi: 10.1080/10615806.2018.1483021. Epub 2018 Jun 25.
BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES: Research has demonstrated an association between social anxiety and impaired Theory of Mind (ToM). We assess whether ToM deficits occur even at a subclinical level of social anxiety and whether group differences in ToM performance are consistent with interpretation bias. We also explore potential reasons as to why socially anxious individuals may perform differently on ToM tasks.
METHODS/DESIGN: Undergraduate participants high (HSA; n = 78) and low (LSA; n = 35) in social anxiety completed a task of ToM decoding, the Reading the Mind in the Eyes (MIE), a task of ToM reasoning, the Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition (MASC), and a post-task questionnaire about their experience completing the MASC.
HSAs performed marginally worse than LSAs on the MIE on neutrally valenced trials, and their pattern of errors may be consistent with a negative interpretation bias. HSAs and LSAs did not differ overall in performance on the MASC, though HSAs reported experiencing more confusion and distress than LSAs during the task, and this distress was associated with more MASC errors for HSA participants only. These results provide insight into the nature of ToM ability in socially anxious individuals and highlight important avenues for future research.
背景/目的：研究表明社交焦虑与心理理论（ToM）受损之间存在关联。我们评估了在亚临床社交焦虑水平下是否存在 ToM 缺陷，以及 ToM 表现的组间差异是否与解释偏差一致。我们还探讨了社交焦虑个体在 ToM 任务上表现不同的潜在原因。
方法/设计：大学生参与者中社交焦虑程度较高（HSA；n=78）和较低（LSA；n=35）完成了一项 ToM 解码任务——“眼神阅读测试”（MIE），一项 ToM 推理任务——“电影评估社会认知”（MASC），以及完成 MASC 后的一份关于其体验的问卷。
HSA 在中性效价试验中比 LSA 略差地完成了 MIE，其错误模式可能与消极的解释偏差一致。HSA 和 LSA 在 MASC 上的整体表现没有差异，尽管 HSA 在完成任务时比 LSA 报告了更多的困惑和困扰，而这种困扰仅与 HSA 参与者的更多 MASC 错误相关。这些结果深入了解了社交焦虑个体的 ToM 能力的本质，并突出了未来研究的重要途径。
