Social Anxiety and Interpretation Bias: Effect of Positive Priming

This study examined how positive-scale assessment of ambiguous social stimuli affects interpretation bias in social anxiety. Participants with high and low social anxiety (N=60) performed a facial expression discrimination task to assess interpretation bias. Participants were then randomly assigned to assess the emotion of briefly presented faces either on a negative or on a positive scale. They subsequently repeated the facial expression discrimination task. Participants with high versus low social anxiety made more negative interpretations of ambiguous facial expressions. However, those in the positive-scale assessment condition subsequently showed reduced negative interpretations of ambiguous facial expressions. These results suggest that interpretation bias in social anxiety could be mediated by positive priming rather than an outright negative bias.