The Influence of Self Focus on Social Anxiety: The Regulating Effect of Self Distance and Mindfulness

Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2020, Vol. 43 ›› Issue (1) : 239-246.

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PDF(606 KB)
Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2020, Vol. 43 ›› Issue (1) : 239-246.

The Influence of Self Focus on Social Anxiety: The Regulating Effect of Self Distance and Mindfulness

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Abstract

Self-focus attention is a kind of awareness of the internal information associated with the self when resource directed to the thoughts and emotions within the individual, which is an important factor in the social anxiety formation process. There are two reflection-style, one is self-immersed perspective, and the other is self-distanced perspective. The former is that individuals focus on the details and feelings when think about past events. The latter is that individuals observe themselves and their experiences in the past events with decenter perspective. Besides, the self-distanced perspective can effectively alleviate social anxiety and reduce negative emotions and avoidance levels of individuals with high social anxiety. The purpose of this paper is to exploring the influence of self-focus attention on social anxiety and the role of self-distance and mindfulness. The two studies used questionnaire and experimental methods respectively to explore the influence of focus content and reflection style on social anxiety. Study1 uses Self-Distance Scale, Self-Consciousness Scale and Interaction Anxiety Scale to measure and 275 participants of college students (135 males, 140 females) administered in the end. The results found that self-focus attention and social anxiety have significantly positive relationship, self-focus attention and self-distance have significantly positive relationship, and self-distance and social anxiety have significantly negative relationship. Besides, the self-distance’s regulating effect was significant between self-focus attention and social anxiety. Either the lower or higher self-distance, self-focus attention could positively predict social anxiety and the higher self-distance individual had lower social anxiety. Study 2 uses 2 (reflection style: self-immersed perspective, self-distanced perspective) x2 (focus content: mindfulness, rumination) between-group design. The subjects completed the following three tasks in turn. Firstly, in the task of social anxiety situation participants need recall the social anxiety events, recording them and evaluating individual social anxiety caused by the events on paper. Secondly, focus and reflection writing task design refers to the experimental paradigm of Sauer and Baer (2012). Self-focus content includes mindfulness and rumination contents. Mindfulness and rumination focuses on experiential and analytical content respectively, the focus content presented on the screen. Focusing experiential content refers to the individual's attention to specific descriptive content and emotions, such as the event process, “what was I feeling”, “what was I thinking” and “what had I done”. Focusing analysis content refers to the individual concern about the causes of events and emotions. Analytical content and experiential content included four questions. Each question presented for two minutes. The self-distanced perspective group answered the questions in the third personal pronouns on the paper. However, the self-immersion perspective group answered the questions with the first-person “I”. Thirdly, participants again rated their current anxiety on social anxiety assessment task. Main conclusions were drawn as below: 1) the main effect of focus content and reflection style are significant. 2) Focus content and reflection style interacted significantly on social anxiety. Besides, the immersed-rumination individuals felt more anxiety, and the distanced-mindfulness individuals felt weaker anxiety when individuals analyzed social anxiety events. Consequently, self-distance and focusing on mindfulness content can effectively alleviate the negative effects of self-focused attention on social anxiety.

Key words

self-focus attention / social anxiety / self-distance / mindfulness

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The Influence of Self Focus on Social Anxiety: The Regulating Effect of Self Distance and Mindfulness[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2020, 43(1): 239-246
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