Abstract
Research on memory bias in social anxiety has yielded contradictory results, pointing to the possibility of important but neglected moderators and confounding factors. This study aimed to investigate the link between social anxiety and autobiographical memory performance for social and nonsocial events, while controlling for and evaluating the effects of several factors including event valence, type of memory detail, and, most noticeably, in-event state anxiety, as well as the interactions between them. Forty-eight students retrieved a total of 191 memories and rated their memory clarity of each event. In a hierarchical linear model, state anxiety predicted higher memory clarity, especially of self-referential details. Trait social anxiety had a significant decreasing effect only on the memory of sensorial details. Furthermore, a multilevel mediation analysis revealed an indirect enhancement effect of social anxiety on the memory of self-referential details, mediated by state anxiety; importantly, the direct and indirect effects were in the opposite directions, pointing to a possible suppression effect. This study suggests that in research on memory bias in social anxiety, not including state anxiety may distort the results. Furthermore, it seems that social anxiety and state anxiety do not affect different types of memory details equally.
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Data Availability
The data for this study is available as an online supplementary file.
Notes
The mean age of event was not reported in the paper, and it was calculated from the mean age of participants at events and their mean age at the study.
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Askari, F., Zia-Tohidi, A. Autobiographical memory bias in social anxiety: The role of state anxiety. Curr Psychol 42, 14609–14619 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-02592-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-02592-9