Social anxiety is associated with impaired memory for imagined social events with positive outcomes

ABSTRACT

Cognitive models of social anxiety disorder suggest that memory biases for negative social information contribute to symptoms of social anxiety (SA). However, it remains unclear whether memory biases in SA are related to social information, specifically, and if so, whether the valence of such information would moderate memory performance. In the present study, 197 community participants were randomised to imagine themselves as the central character in either 10 social or 10 non-social scenarios. In both conditions, half of the scenarios ended with objectively positive outcomes and half ended with objectively negative outcomes. Results demonstrated that higher trait SA was related to memory performance for social scenarios only, and in particular to poorer memory for social scenarios that ended positively. Thus, the impact of SA on memory performance depended on how social information was framed, with higher SA related to poorer memory for positive social experiences. These context-specific effects contribute to the growing literature on positivity deficits in SA.

KEYWORDS:

• Social anxiety
• memory bias
• positivity deficit
• episodic memory
• imagined scenarios

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Participants were randomly assigned to scenario context condition in order to minimize the burden on participants and maintain data quality, especially given the online nature of data collection. We reasoned that if participants were required to complete both social and non-social memory tasks there may have been more threats to data quality, such as increased participant inattention throughout the study, possible floor effects, as well as carry-over effects due to participants completing both types of scenarios.

2 We disambiguated the scenario only at the end of the sentence because we were interested in teasing apart the effect of social context versus the effect of valence. We believed that having participants encode the information in this way might better allow us to examine the effects of encoding the social vs. nonsocial context separately from its valenced outcome. If the scenario was introduced as having a negative outcome from the start, any observed effects related to social context could have been confounded by valence effects due to their combined presentation at encoding.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under grant [SSHRC Insight grant number: 435-2018-0959].