Wu Huating, Yue Caizhen, Cao Fasheng, Long Yihong, Wang Yan
College of National Culture and Cognitive Science, Guizhou Minzu University, Guiyang, China.
School of Public Administration, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China.
Front Psychiatry. 2024 Feb 5;14:1283624. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2023.1283624. eCollection 2023.
As one of the most common psychological problems, social anxiety disorder (SAD) has lots of negative effects on the physical and mental development of individuals, such as decreasing the quality of interpersonal relationships, and even causing depression, suicidal ideation, etc., as well as leads individuals to generate mental illness stigma. The mental illness stigma that individuals perceive affects not only how they perceive themselves (first-person perspective) but also how they perceive others' appraisals of them (third-person perspective), which further exacerbates their anxiety symptoms.
The study aims to explore the self-processing characteristics of individuals with social anxiety disorder from the first-person perspective and the third-person perspective.
This study adopted the self-referential paradigm to conduct the recognition memory test on individuals with social anxiety disorder (30 participants in experiment 1) and individuals without social anxiety disorder (31 participants in experiment 2) in the two experiments.
In experiment 1, the recognition rate of individuals with social anxiety disorder under the self-appraisals condition was significantly higher than that under the condition of appraisals on mothers; in the three conditions of self-appraisals, appraisals on mothers and mothers' reflected appraisals, the recognition rate of negative trait adjectives was significantly higher than that of positive trait adjectives. In experiment 2, there was no significant difference in recognition rate of individuals without social anxiety disorder under the three conditions, and the recognition rate of positive trait adjectives was significantly higher than that of negative trait adjectives under the three conditions.
Individuals with social anxiety disorder have a negative bias in self-processing and are more likely to focus on self-information, which is different from the self-positive bias of individuals without social anxiety disorder. This study can be beneficial to know the self-cognitive characteristics of individuals with social anxiety disorder, help them get rid of negative cognitive patterns, and remove the mental illness stigma.
社交焦虑障碍（SAD）作为最常见的心理问题之一，对个体的身心健康发展有诸多负面影响，如降低人际关系质量，甚至引发抑郁、自杀观念等，还会使个体产生精神疾病污名。个体所感知到的精神疾病污名不仅影响他们对自身的认知（第一人称视角），还影响他们对他人对自己评价的认知（第三人称视角），这进一步加剧了他们的焦虑症状。
本研究旨在从第一人称视角和第三人称视角探讨社交焦虑障碍个体的自我加工特点。
本研究采用自我参照范式，在两个实验中分别对社交焦虑障碍个体（实验1中有30名参与者）和无社交焦虑障碍个体（实验2中有31名参与者）进行识别记忆测试。
在实验1中，社交焦虑障碍个体在自我评价条件下的识别率显著高于对母亲评价条件下的识别率；在自我评价、对母亲评价和母亲的反射性评价这三种条件下，负性特质形容词的识别率显著高于正性特质形容词的识别率。在实验2中，无社交焦虑障碍个体在三种条件下的识别率无显著差异，且在这三种条件下正性特质形容词的识别率显著高于负性特质形容词的识别率。
社交焦虑障碍个体在自我加工中存在负性偏差，更倾向于关注自我信息，这与无社交焦虑障碍个体的自我积极偏差不同。本研究有助于了解社交焦虑障碍个体的自我认知特点，帮助他们摆脱消极认知模式，消除精神疾病污名。
