Interpreting Ambiguous Social Situations in Social Anxiety: Application of Computerized Task Measuring Interpretation Bias

Interpretation bias 1 Title: Interpretation of ambiguous situations: evidence for a dissociation between social and physical threat in Williams syndrome Running Head: Interpretation bias in WS

Interpreting ambiguous social cues in unpredictable contexts.

Unpredictable environments can be anxiety-provoking and elicit exaggerated emotional responses to aversive stimuli. Even neutral stimuli, when presented in an unpredictable fashion, prime anxiety-like behavior and elicit heightened amygdala activity. The amygdala plays a key role in initiating responses to biologically relevant information, such as facial expressions of emotion. While some expr...

Interpretations of ambiguous social situations and cardiovascular responses in adolescents.

BACKGROUND Previous research has documented effects of ambiguous outcome social situations on individual differences in cardiovascular reactivity in laboratory contexts. PURPOSE This study tested whether interpretations of ambiguous social situations are associated with daily life cardiovascular responses using ambulatory approaches. METHODS There were 206 high school adolescents assessed o...

[The effects of interpretation bias for social events and automatic thoughts on social anxiety].

Many studies have demonstrated that individuals with social anxiety interpret ambiguous social situations negatively. It is, however, not clear whether the interpretation bias discriminatively contributes to social anxiety in comparison with depressive automatic thoughts. The present study investigated the effects of negative interpretation bias and automatic thoughts on social anxiety. The Soc...

Measuring Social Influence Without Bias

How well can statistical models disentangle the effects of social influence from homophily in observational network data, and under what conditions do they models fail?1 Many outcomes of interest to social scientists – such as obesity, political attitudes, altruism, and drug use – are highly correlated within social networks.2 However, behaviors and attitudes tend to be correlated in social net...

Social anxiety and the interpretation of positive social events.

We report four independent studies that examined the relationship between social interaction anxiety and the tendency to interpret positive social events in a threat-maintaining manner. Study 1 described the development of a scale that measures negative interpretations of positive social events, the interpretation of positive events scale (IPES). Study 2 cross-validated the structure of the IPE...