Attributional responses of anxious individuals to different patterns of social feedback: nothing succeeds like improvement.

The causal attributions of socially anxious and nonanxious subjects were studied following four patterns of social feedback: consistent success, improvement, deterioration, and consistent failure. Providing anxious subjects with improving feedback produced the strongest internal attribution for positive outcomes, albeit to the unstable factor of effort. Nonanxious subjects, on the other hand, accepted greatest personal responsibility for consistent success. Socially anxious individuals also ascribed greater importance to the external factors of luck and task difficulty than did nonanxious subjects. Possible implications for treatment of socially anxious clients are discussed.