Theory of mind ability in high socially anxious individuals

ABSTRACT

Background/Objectives: Research has demonstrated an association between social anxiety and impaired Theory of Mind (ToM). We assess whether ToM deficits occur even at a subclinical level of social anxiety and whether group differences in ToM performance are consistent with interpretation bias. We also explore potential reasons as to why socially anxious individuals may perform differently on ToM tasks.

Methods/Design: Undergraduate participants high (HSA; n = 78) and low (LSA; n = 35) in social anxiety completed a task of ToM decoding, the Reading the Mind in the Eyes (MIE), a task of ToM reasoning, the Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition (MASC), and a post-task questionnaire about their experience completing the MASC.

Results: HSAs performed marginally worse than LSAs on the MIE on neutrally valenced trials, and their pattern of errors may be consistent with a negative interpretation bias. HSAs and LSAs did not differ overall in performance on the MASC, though HSAs reported experiencing more confusion and distress than LSAs during the task, and this distress was associated with more MASC errors for HSA participants only. These results provide insight into the nature of ToM ability in socially anxious individuals and highlight important avenues for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Social anxiety
• social phobia
• theory of mind

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Ariella P. Lenton-Brym http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6322-498X

Notes

1 Authors ALB and VV rated the valence of each MASC response option as positive (1), negative (−1) or neutral (0) and achieved an intraclass correlation coefficient (consistent agreement; two-way random model) of .84. Based on their ratings, 60–62.2% of “excessive ToM” responses involved making a negative assumption.

2 These authors also rated the valence of each MIE response option that reflects a negative interpretation bias (i.e., the percentage of “more negative” response options across all positive and neutral trials). Based on these ratings, 59.61% of incorrect response options on these trials involve “more negative” options.

3 DASS depression subscale scores were unrelated to participants’ total number of MASC errors and number of errors on each subtype of MASC error (i.e., “excessive ToM,” “less ToM,” and “no ToM”; all r values below .10; all p-values above .330). Our results indicated a small to moderate correlation between DASS depression subscale scores and overall number of MIE errors (r = .21, p = .032), and number of errors on neutral trials (r = .21, p = .033). However, when we compared the strength of the correlation between total MIE errors and DASS depression subscale scores to the strength of the correlation between total MIE errors and SPIN scores using Fisher’s r-to-Z formula for dependent correlations, we found no significant difference (Z = .54, p = 59), suggesting that MIE performance was not more strongly associated with symptoms of depression than with symptoms of social anxiety. Depression was unrelated to MIE performance on positive (r = .16, p = .103) and negative (r = .13, p = .175) trials.