Mnemonic discrimination and social anxiety: the role of state anxiety

ABSTRACT

The Mnemonic Similarity Task (MST) measures mnemonic discrimination, or the ability to correctly identify new stimuli from highly similar, old stimuli. Poor mnemonic discrimination is a potential risk or maintenance factor for anxiety, and recent studies suggest state affect may moderate relations between mnemonic discrimination and trait anxiety. No studies have evaluated mnemonic discrimination in specific subtypes of anxiety or with clinically relevant stressors. This preregistered study evaluated the role of social anxiety and the anticipation of a future speech on MST performance. Participants with high (n = 66) and low (n = 64) levels of social anxiety were randomly assigned to a stressor condition or a control condition prior to the MST. State anxiety was measured throughout the study. Results did not indicate significant effects of trait (high vs. low social anxiety) or state anxiety (stressor condition vs. control condition) on mnemonic discrimination. Results are compared with previous research and implications and future directions are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Social anxiety
• mnemonic discrimination
• state anxiety
• episodic memory

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dr. Shauna Stark for her expertise and willingness to provide resources and guidance for the MST. They would also like to thank their research assistants, Miranda Shupp, Sarah Segear, and Julean Bender.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a full list of measures, please email the corresponding author ([email protected]).

2 Age increases are associated with poorer mnemonic discrimination (Stark et al., 2015), and Bernstein and colleagues (2019) found significant effects only for individuals under 40 years old. As such, we removed participants above age 35 as conservative cut-off.

3 Due to an oversight during our OSF preregistration, we noted that we would use t-tests (when we actually needed to utilize one-way ANOVAs) to assess for group differences.