A Quantitative Estimate of Schema Abnormality in Socially Anxious and Non‐Anxious Individuals

Abstract

Although cognitive theories of anxiety suggest that anxious individuals are characterized by abnormal threat‐relevant schemas, few empirical studies have estimated the nature of these cognitive structures using quantitative methods that lend themselves to inferential statistical analysis. In the present study, socially anxious (n = 55) and non‐anxious (n = 62) participants completed 3 Q‐Sort tasks to assess their knowledge of events that commonly occur in social or evaluative scenarios. Participants either sorted events according to how commonly they personally believe the events occur (i.e. “self” condition), or to how commonly they estimate that most people believe they occur (i.e. “other” condition). Participants' individual Q‐Sorts were correlated with mean sorts obtained from a normative sample to obtain an estimate of schema abnormality, with lower correlations representing greater levels of abnormality. Relative to non‐anxious participants, socially anxious participants' sorts were less strongly associated with sorts of the normative sample, particularly in the “self” condition, although secondary analyses suggest that some significant results might be explained, in part, by depression and experience with the scenarios. These results provide empirical support for the theoretical notion that threat‐relevant self‐schemas of anxious individuals are characterized by some degree of abnormality.

Keywords:

• social anxiety
• schema
• cognition
• Q‐Sort

Acknowledgements

Data collected from the normative sample comprised a portion of Donna Purath's senior honors thesis, and data collected from participants in the “self” condition comprised a portion of Jennifer Brendle's doctoral dissertation. Portions of this project were presented at the 36th Annual Meeting of the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy, Boston, MA, USA.

The authors thank Tracy Emerson, Jennifer Halverson, Timothy O'Gorman, Tonia Jackson, Danny Johnson, Nathan Peterson, Hillary Reiser, and Tara Verde for their assistance with data collection.

Notes

1. A complete set of stimuli and normative ratings on their commonality and relation to anxiety are available from the first author.