Abnormal Psychology

Anxiety Disorders 283

Psychological Factors

Three types of psychological factors infl uence the emergence and maintenance of

social phobia: cognitive biases and distortions, classical conditioning, and operant

conditioning.

Cognitive Biases and Distortions

People who have social phobia have particular biases in attention and memory

(Ledley & Heimberg, 2006; Lundh & Öst, 1996; Wenzel & Cochran, 2006). At the

outset of one study, participants were shown photos of faces and asked to judge

each facial expression as critical or accepting (Lundh & Öst, 1996). Following this,

they were shown a larger set of faces and asked to pick out the ones that they had

been shown initially. Those with social phobia were more likely to recognize the

faces that they had earlier judged as critical, whereas those without social phobia

were more likely to recognize faces that they had judged as accepting. Thus, people

with social phobia seem to pay more attention to—and hence better remember—

faces that they perceive as critical, which in turn feeds into their fears about being

evaluated.

Similarly, cognitive distortions about the world can lead people with social

phobia to see it as a very dangerous place; they then become chronically hypervigi-

lant for potential social threats and negative evaluations by others (Beck & Emery,

1985; Joorman & Gotlib, 2006; Rapee & Heimberg, 1997). Of course, such anx-

ious apprehension about social situations usually is not rational. People with social

phobia also use distorted emotional reasoning as proof that they will be judged neg-

atively: They evaluate the impression they made on others based on how anxious

they became during the interaction, regardless of what actually transpired. So, for

instance, a woman who is very nervous when giving a talk will base her evaluation

of her performance not on how well she conveyed her message or by the response

of the audience, but by how anxious she felt. People with social phobia interpret

ambiguous cues as negative, which becomes proof that they were correct in their

concerns. For example, people with social phobia are more likely than control par-

ticipants to perceive neutral—and even happy—facial expressions as being negative

(Stevens, Gerlach, & Rist, 2008). The anxious woman giving a talk may interpret the

fact that some audience members in the front row are leaning forward in their seats

during her talk as proof that they are “waiting for me to falter or make a jerk out

of myself” rather than that they might be leaning in to hear her better or might be

stretching their backs. People with social phobia also tend to have less positive be-

liefs about their own personality traits and social abilities compared to people who

do not have this anxiety disorder (Rapee & Abbott, 2006; Wilson & Rapee, 2006).

Such distorted thinking about self and social situations maintains the social phobia.

Unfortunately, such cognitive biases and distortions don’t occur only during

anxiety-provoking social encounters. People with social phobia persist in evaluating

their social interactions long after others stop: Compared to nonanxious control

participants, when asked to give an impromptu speech, those with social phobia

were more like to assess their performance negatively and to ruminate on their

performance a week later (Abbott & Rapee, 2004).

Classical Conditioning

In some cases, classical conditioning can contribute to the development of social

phobia: A social situation (the conditioned stimulus) becomes paired with a negative

social experience (such as public humiliation) to produce a conditioned emotional

response (Mineka & Zinbarg, 1995). The conditioned response (fear or anxiety)

may generalize to other, or even all, types of social situations. Based on letters from

Hughes’s mother to the director of the sleep-away camp he attended as a child, it

seems that Hughes was teased by his campmates and took the teasing to heart.

According to classical conditioning principles, it’s possible that the sight of these

campmates or the sound of their voices became a conditioned stimulus and induced