An experimental study in China used electroencephalographic imaging and brain activity patterns (known as event-related potentials) to compare the memory processes related to certain words in high- and low-anxiety students. Results indicated that social anxiety modulates the effect of recognition memory for social threat words. The study was published in Biological Psychology.
Social anxiety involves fear and avoidance of scrutiny from others in social interactions. After events where they were scrutinized by others, persons high in social anxiety spend a lot of time thinking about the event and they also think a lot about negative contents from their past encounters with others. These thoughts are often intrusive and persistent with very vivid details of what the person perceives as humiliation. They are typically quite distressing.
Previous research indicates that socially anxious persons might be processing memories and stimuli related to what they perceive as social threats differently than people with lower levels of social anxiety. Socially anxious people tend to pay special attention to what they see as social threats and remember them better and much more elaborately. In this way, social anxiety impairs an individual’s focus as the person devotes his/her attention to threat stimuli, tending to disregard any other relevant contents in the interaction it participates in.
Aiming to study the effects of social anxiety on memory, Jianqin Cao and her colleagues conducted a study in which they compared how students high and low in social anxiety differ when tasked with memorizing neutral and social threat words. They asked a group of 348 undergraduate students to complete a social anxiety assessment (Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale, LSAS). From this group they selected those with very high and very low social anxiety scores, a total of 61 students (31 and 30, respectively). Both groups consisted mostly of female students (over 80%), but male/female ratios were similar in the high anxiety and low anxiety groups.
The researchers used a group of 560 two-character Chinese words (140 neutral and 420 social threat words) for a task in which sets of words were first presented to study participants, thus giving them a chance to memorize the words. This was the, so called, encoding phase of the procedure. In the next, test phase of the procedure, participants were again shown words and asked to respond as quickly as possible whether the word shown to them was in the set from the previous phase or not.
The researchers recorded the time it took participants to respond (reaction time) and their accuracy (number of correct answers). They continuously recorded electroencephalographic data from participants brains using an electrode cap, with a sample rate of 500 Hz the memory tasks. Two additional sets of electrodes were used to record the activity of eye-related nerves, i.e., make vertical and horizontal electrooculograms. These electrodes were attached above and below the left eye of the participant and also beside the two eyes.
Results showed some differences between how quick and accurate participants on average were in recognizing old vs. new words and also neutral and social threat words. However, no differences between the high anxiety and low anxiety groups were obtained with regards to performance on the recognition tasks, i.e., their reaction times and accuracy were roughly equal.
On the other hand, event related potentials captured through electroencephalographic recordings showed somewhat different patterns in the low anxiety group when recognizing threat words that were presented in the encoding phase and those that were not.
“Although no significant group differences (high social anxiety vs. low social anxiety) were found in recognition memory performance for target and distracter words, the event related potential data showed that social anxiety modulates the effect of recognition memory for social threat words,” the study authors conclude.
The study findings contribute to the existing knowledge of neural processing of social threats of people with different anxiety level. However, it should be taken into account that most of the participants were females and that it is difficult to draw precise inferences about functional activity of brain structures from electroencephalographic recordings only.
The paper, “The effects of social anxiety on recognition memory for social threat words: An ERP study”, was authored by Jianqin Cao, Feng Si, Xiaohuan Li, Chunyan Guo, and Xiaodong Yue.