Shorter communication
Memory for facial expressions in social phobia

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Abstract

Memory biases toward threat have been documented in several anxiety disorders, but contradictory findings have recently been reported in social phobics' recognition of facial expressions. The present study examined recognition memory in clients with social phobia, in an effort to clarify previous inconsistent results. Just before giving a speech to a live audience, social phobia clients and normal controls viewed photographs of people with reassuring and threatening facial expressions. The stimuli were later presented again alongside photographs of the same person with a different facial expression, and participants chose which face they had seen before. Individuals with social phobia were less accurate at recognizing previously seen photographs than controls, apparently due to state anxiety. In contrast, social phobics did not show a memory bias toward threatening facial expressions. Theoretical and treatment implications are discussed.

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Stimulus generation and selection

Volunteer models of various ethnic backgrounds produced four basic facial expressions representing extremes of threat and reassurance (disgust, anger, surprise, and happy) while being photographed in front of a black background. To generate relatively consistent and prototypical facial expressions, volunteers imagined standard one-sentence vignettes (e.g., “You see a dead animal that has been lying there for a long time” for disgust) and mimicked photographs for each facial expression from

Results

Preliminary analyses of the data showed that signal detection (SD) estimates and other experimental variables were relatively normally distributed with the exception of reaction time. Transformed reaction time data were examined with a repeated measures ANOVA. Results showed that clients with social phobia and normal controls did not differ in terms of overall response latency, nor was there a significant interaction between trial outcome (e.g., hit, false alarm) and diagnosis. As one would

Discussion

The main purpose of this study was to examine evidence for disruptions in memory of facial expressions in individuals with social phobia who are facing a feared social situation. Overall, clients with social phobia were less accurate than normal controls in identifying the expressions associated with faces that they had previously seen, and this impairment was largely due to their higher anxiety during the memory task, which occurred immediately before they were to give an extemporaneous

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