Implicit and explicit memory bias to negative emotional information processing in students with and without social anxiety disorder

Anxiety disorders are characterized by facilitating access to threatening information. Individuals with social anxiety usually pay attention to threatening social information during and after social events and they often feel anxious due to remaining memories of their “poor” performance. Information-processing models of emotional disorders suggest that preferential processing of threat-relevant information such as a memory bias for threat-relevant information underlie this disorder. Cognitive models also believe that socially anxious people are characterized by biases in the recall of social events and these biases may play a causal role in the development and maintenance of social anxiety disorders. However, the findings of the previous studies are mixed and further research is needed. The aim of this study was to investigate the implicit and explicit memory bias against negative emotional information processing in students with and without social anxiety disorder. The study includes two groups: students with social anxiety disorder (N= 25, Mean age = 22.21; SD = 2.97) and the control group (N = 25, Mean age = 21.83; SD = 2.25). Socially anxious students were selected based on their results on a clinical interview and Connor's Social Phobia Inventory. The groups were matched in terms of variables including age, sex, and education level. The implicit memory test was a word recognition task and the explicit memory test was an incidental free recall with threatening and neutral words. The social anxious group presented an overall higher priming effect in the implicit memory test and recalled more anxious relevant words than other word types. However, no significant difference was found between students with and without social anxiety disorder in explicit memory. The results indicated the presence of implicit memory bias in students with social anxiety disorder. Biases in implicit memory can be proposed as possible mechanisms to explain why people with social anxiety tend to make negative evaluations of themselves in social situations. In fact, biased processing after the social event may play an important role in facilitating the selective recall of negative information about one's social performance, so that it affects their future performance in social situations. Generally, the results of the present research are in accord with other researches and support the principles governing memory bias and social anxiety disorder according to cognitive theories of social anxiety.