Effects of varying levels of anxiety within social situations: relationship to memory perspective and attributions in social phobia

Cognitive-behavioral theorists (Clark & Wells, 1995: Clark, D. M. & Wells, A. (1995). A cognitive model of social phobia. In R. G. Heimberg, M. R. Liebowitz, D. A. Hope, & F. R. Schneier (Eds.), Social phobia: Diagnosis, assessment, and treatment (pp. 69-93). New York: Guilford Press; Rapee & Heimberg, 1997: Rapee, R. M., & Heimberg, R. G. (1997). A cognitive-behavioral model of anxiety in social phobia. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 35, 741-756.) propose that individuals with social phobia form mental images of themselves as if from an external point of view. Research by Wells and colleagues has shown that, when recalling anxiety-provoking social situations, individuals with social phobia are more likely to take an observer perspective (seeing oneself as if from an external point of view) whereas control subjects are more likely to take a field perspective (as if looking out through one's own eyes). Furthermore, this pattern is specific to social events, as both groups recall non-social events from a field perspective (see Wells, Clark & Ahmad, 1998: Wells, A., Clark, D. M., & Ahmad, S. (1998). How do I look with my minds eye: perspective taking in social phobic imagery. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 36, 631-634; Wells & Papageorigou, 1999: Wells, A. & Papageorgiou, C. (1999). The observer perspective: Biased imagery in social phobia, agoraphobia, and blood/injury phobia. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 37, 653-658). In the current study, individuals with social phobia took more of an observer perspective than non-anxious controls when recalling high anxiety social situations. However, both groups took a predominantly field perspective for memories of medium or low anxiety social situations. As memory perspective has also been shown to be related to causal attributions, we examined this relationship in our sample. Memories of low, medium, and high anxiety social situations were differentially related to attributions for each group. Patients' attributions for their performance became more internal, stable, and global as the anxiety level of the situation increased, while the attributions of control subjects showed the opposite pattern.