中華心理衛生協會

Purpose: We explored the interpretative cognition processes of socially-anxious individuals using the sentence word association paradigm (SWAP), which was modified from the word sentence association paradigm (WSAP; Beard & Amir, 2009). Methods: We selected 86 high and 59 low socially-anxious students from a college. All of them completed the SWAP measure and 7 questionnaires about social anxiety, emotion, and interpretative bias. Analysis of variance and correlation analysis were applied to investigate the interpretative cognition processes of socially-anxious individuals. Results: The between-group results showed that high socially-anxious individuals had a higher reaction time to accepting and endorsing benign interpretations and rejecting threatening interpretations as compared to low socially-anxious individuals. In endorsement rate, high socially-anxious individuals had more threaten interpretation and lower benign interpretation than low socially-anxious individuals. Moreover, the within-group reaction time data revealed that low socially-anxious individuals easily reject threatening interpretations, but high socially-anxious individuals did not show any significant difference in rejection of threatening or benign interpretations. In addition, the correlational data revealed that those with higher social anxiety had significantly more positive correlations with threatening interpretative bias and significantly more negative correlations with benign interpretative bias in social situations. Conclusions: SWAP has the potential to become an assistive assessment tool.