Abstract

The present study attempted to investigate self-relevant information processing characteristics of socially anxious individuals in no stress condition(experiment 1) and social-evaluative stress condition(experiment 2). A modified self-referent depth-of-processing paradigm was employed. Stimulus adjectives were classified into social threat words and non-threat words. In experiment 1, socially anxious students showed greater recall of words in private self-referent condition than any other conditions. In experiment 2, socially anxious students showed greater recall of words in public self-referent condition than any other conditions. Inconsistently with the prediction in experiment 3, socially anxious students did not show greater recall of social threat words in public self-referent condition than any other conditions. Additionally, some implications of present results and methodological issues were discussed.