Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry
Training less threatening interpretations over the Internet: Does the number of missing letters matter?
Section snippets
Participants
Three hundred and fifty participants (64.9% female) were recruited over the Internet, via Amazon.com's Mechanical Turtk (mTurk), in exchange for $0.40.1 Participants reported citizenship from 16 countries, with the majority of participants (92.9%) reporting U.S. citizenship. Participants'
Descriptive statistics
The training conditions did not differ in terms of baseline social anxiety symptoms, as measured by the SIAS (F(4, 345) = 1.51, p = .199, = .02), or baseline interpretation bias, as measured by the BSIQ (F(4, 345) = 1.76, p = .136, = .02). Conditions also did not differ in terms of ethnicity (χ2 = 4.50, p = .810), race (χ2 = 23.63, p = .098), education (χ2 = 15.53, p = .486), gender (χ2 = 15.25, p = .054), or whether or not participants reported US citizenship (χ2 = 6.54, p = .162).
Discussion
The current study evaluated the efficacy of a brief, Internet-based CBM-I paradigm to determine if it modified social anxiety-relevant interpretations to be more positive/less negative, and if it reduced fear of negative evaluation and anticipatory anxiety. This study also tested if the amount of active generation required to complete the CBM-I task (operationalized by number of letters missing from word fragments) affected the magnitude of CBM-I effects. Finally, this study evaluated the
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Andrew Mathews and Bundy Mackintosh for sharing their study materials. Also, thanks to Fred Smyth, Emily Umansky, and Sriram Natarajan for their assistance with programming this study. Additionally, thanks to Lauren Hallion and members of the Teachman Program for Anxiety and Cognition Treatment (PACT) Lab, especially Nauder Namaky, for their helpful feedback and suggestions. This study was supported by NIA R01AG033033 grant awarded to Bethany Teachman. Note, B.
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