Akanksha Srivastav presented “Using the Implicit Association Test to Assess Fears of Positive and Negative Evaluation in SAD” at a symposium at the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies annual convention Nov. 20-23 in Philadelphia.
Howell is a Psychology graduate student at Ohio University. Dr. Justin Weeks, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Ohio University, was a co-author.
The symposium was on “Reexamining Implicit Cognition in Psychopathology: The Role of Associative and Propositional Processes.”
The Implicit Association Test (IAT) has been extensively used in experimental psychopathology research as a measure of the strength of a person’s automatic association between mental representations. In contrast to explicit self-report measures, implicit measures reduce the participant’s ability to control his or her responses in such a way that they do not depend on introspective access to the psychological construct of interest. However, it may be that automatically activated propositions also play a role. This can be tested using the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP), a novel measure designed to capture how concepts are propositionally related to one another. The IAT measures associative processes between one set of concepts (e.g., self or other) and another set of concepts (e.g., positive or negative) without taking into account the role of automatically activated propositions. The IRAP provides an implicit measure of the propositions regarding the way in which those concepts are related (e.g. I am or I want to be).
This symposium presented an overview of novel results using the IAT and the IRAP, showing the potential of both procedures to differentially predict clinically relevant outcomes in comparison to explicit measures, and their relevance for Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT). Akanksha Srivastav and colleagues adopted the Single Target IAT to examine differences in automatic associations for social anxiety, and fear of negative and positive evaluation between high and low social anxious individuals. The implicit measure predicted eye gaze during a speech task, highlighting its utility in predicting anxiety-related behaviors during social or performance situations.
Using the Implicit Association Test to Assess Fears of Positive and Negative Evaluation in SAD
The bivalent fear of evaluation (BFOE; Weeks & Howell, 2012) model has called attention to fear of negative evaluation (FNE) and fear of positive evaluation (FPE) as co-core cognitive components of social anxiety (SA). The present study is the first to use implicit tests to examine automatic associations within the context of the BFOE model of SA. We used the Single Target-Implicit Association Test (ST-IAT), with word stimuli, to examine differences in automatic associations for social anxiety, FNE, and FPE between groups high and low in SA. We expected that high SA individuals would exhibit greater negative associations on ST-IATs examining general social stimuli, positively-valenced social stimuli, and negatively-valenced social stimuli compared to low SA individuals. We also examined changes in automatic associations before and after a public speaking task. Two groups of persons high (n = 25) versus low (n = 25) in social anxiety completed all ST-IATs. Following the ST-IATs, participants completed an impromptu speech task, and then completed the ST-IATs once more. An abbreviated diagnostic interview and battery of questionnaires were also administered. The high SA group exhibited significantly greater negative associations compared to the low SA group on the ST-IAT assessing negatively-valenced stimuli (t=2.48, p<0.05), but not on the ST-IATs assessing social stimuli in general or positive social stimuli. Regression analyses revealed that ST-IAT scores for negatively-valenced stimuli and general social stimuli negatively predicted objectively-rated eye-gaze during the speech (β >-0.37, p<.05). Furthermore, there was a significant decrease in the strength of positive associations for positively-valenced stimuli after the speech (t=2.39, p<.05). We found pre-speech significant differences between the groups with an implicit measure targeting FNE; furthermore, responses on implicit measures of FNE and social anxiety predicted reduced eye gaze during the speech. Moreover, responses to the implicit measure of FPE changed significantly and in the expected direction in response to the speech task, suggesting that FPE may have been cued in response to social threat. These results highlight the importance of using implicit measures and their utility in predicting anxiety-related behaviors during social or performance situations. Examining implicit associations may also have important clinical implications for assessment and treatment outcome evaluations for patients with social anxiety disorder.
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