Investigating the Role of Post-Event Processing in the Maintenance of Social Anxiety Symptoms
Creators: name: Kane, Leanne
Publisher: name: Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa
Year: 2022
Subjects: social anxiety
post-event processing

description: Individuals experience varying levels of anxiety in social situations. When intense and enduring, this anxiety can lead to difficulties in daily functioning. Considering the often-central roles that relationships and interactions play in people's lives, it becomes crucial to understand how unhelpful levels of social anxiety are maintained over time. According to cognitive theories of social anxiety disorder, post-event processing (PEP; e.g., the review of the negative aspects of past social situations), is one of the factors that can perpetuate symptoms of social anxiety. The objective of this dissertation was to investigate PEP and its relationship with other important cognitive and affective factors across two studies to better understand its role in social anxiety. In Study 1, I assessed the temporal links between PEP, anticipatory processing (AP), anxiety, performance appraisals, and memory. Participants (n = 101) completed two speeches, four days apart. In between the two speeches, they answered ecological momentary assessment alerts to measure PEP about the first speech and AP about the second speech. I found that both PEP and AP decreased over the two-day assessment period. Feeling more anxious during the first speech also triggered a cascade of negative thinking and affect, including worse performance appraisals, increased PEP and AP, and higher anxiety levels in anticipation of the second speech. Contrary to expectations, PEP was unrelated to change in performance appraisals over time. There was also preliminary evidence that PEP might be linked to the phenomenological memory qualities of the first speech, namely its valence and emotional intensity. In Study 2, I extended these findings by examining positive PEP and pleasant social interactions in addition to the typically studied negative PEP and stressful social interactions. Participants (n = 411) brought back to mind a recent stressful or pleasant social interaction, completed self-reported measures, and wrote a description of the recalled interaction. Participants who recalled a stressful interaction reported engaging in more negative PEP, and less positive PEP, compared to those who recalled a pleasant interaction. I also observed that higher social anxiety was linked with more negative and less positive PEP irrespective of whether the PEP was following a stressful or a pleasant interaction. Moreover, participants' descriptions of the interactions contained more negative words when they also reported having engaged in more negative PEP. Negative PEP was also associated with a more negative emotionally intense self-reported memory of the interaction. In addition, descriptions contained more positive and less negative words when participants reported engaging in more positive PEP. Positive PEP's relationship with memory depended on whether the interaction was stressful or pleasant. For the former, positive PEP was related to a more positive memory; for the latter, it was related to increased emotional intensity. Both studies help elucidate the complex nature of PEP. Their conclusions have many theoretical and clinical implications for the PEP and social anxiety field (e.g., how negative PEP evolves over time, how high social anxiety may be characterized by both more negative and less positive PEP). Considering methodological strengths and limitations provides additional questions and directions for future research examining negative and positive PEP.