Abstract

The present study aimed to investigate self-referential attention bias and memory bias according to social anxiety levels in early adulthood. Participants (N=110) were divided into four groups: high social anxiety (HSA), middle social anxiety (MSA), low social anxiety (LSA), and healthy control (HC). Attention bias was measured using spatial cueing task, and memory bias was measured using a source monitoring task. Stimuli of the tasks were presented under three conditions for the tasks: self-reference (SR1), perception of self by others (SR2), and other-reference (OR). Disengagement bias scores (DBS) were used as an attention bias. Conditional Source Identification Measure (CSIM) was used to measure the ability to recognize the source of the words learned and guess indicator (g) was used to measure the ability to guess the source of words not learned. According to the attention task results, the HSA group had difficulty disengaging attention (DBS) from negative stimuli at SR2 compared to the HC group. In the memory task, the MSA group showed higher accuracy for positive stimulus of OR than the HC group (CSIM). This reflects the result that, unlike the HC group that avoided positive stimulus of OR, the MSA group showed no attention bias. The clinical significance of the findings in this study on the relationship between attention and memory processing in social anxiety groups was discussed by introducing self-referential conditions.