Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University, P.O. Box 9104, 6500 HE, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Res Child Adolesc Psychopathol. 2022 Aug;50(8):1067-1080. doi: 10.1007/s10802-022-00915-3. Epub 2022 Apr 18.
This pre-registered study focused on developing a new social picture task to assess interpretation bias related to social fears in adolescents. Using such a pictorial task may increase ecological validity and readily trigger emotional processes compared to more traditional verbal tasks that are often used. In the picture task, ambiguous social pictures were presented, followed by a positive and negative interpretation. In this study, we examined how the new task relates to an already existing interpretation bias task and how the new pictorial task relates to social fears in adolescents. The sample consisted of 329 adolescents aged 12 to 18 years. Interpretation bias was assessed with the newly developed pictorial task and with more traditional verbal vignettes. Social fears were measured with self-report questionnaires. The results suggest that the pictorial task was able to assess interpretation bias comparable to the verbal vignettes, suggesting appropriate convergent validity. Interpretation bias assessed with the picture task was linked to higher levels of fear of negative evaluation, the core symptom of social anxiety, but not to social anxiety symptoms in general. The verbal task was linked to both social fears and thus still seems the preferred method to investigate interpretation bias related to social fears in adolescents. However, we do believe that with further improvement of the pictorial task, it could be a useful addition to the research field.
这项预先注册的研究专注于开发一种新的社会图片任务，以评估青少年与社交恐惧相关的解释偏差。与经常使用的传统口头任务相比，使用这样的图片任务可以提高生态有效性并更容易触发情绪过程。在图片任务中，呈现了模棱两可的社会图片，然后进行正面和负面的解释。在这项研究中，我们研究了新任务与现有的解释偏差任务的关系，以及新的图片任务与青少年社交恐惧的关系。该样本由 329 名 12 至 18 岁的青少年组成。使用新开发的图片任务和更传统的口头情景来评估解释偏差。使用自我报告问卷测量社交恐惧。结果表明，图片任务能够评估与口头情景相似的解释偏差，表明具有适当的收敛效度。使用图片任务评估的解释偏差与负面评价恐惧的水平更高相关，这是社交焦虑的核心症状，但与一般的社交焦虑症状无关。口头任务与社交恐惧有关，因此似乎仍然是研究青少年社交恐惧相关解释偏差的首选方法。然而，我们确实相信，通过进一步改进图片任务，它可以成为研究领域的有用补充。
