Representations of self and others in social anxiety / phobia

Jocelyn Manning

Research output: ThesisDoctoral Thesis

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Abstract

Fear of negative evaluation by others has been a central construct in psychological research in social anxiety and social phobia. Fear of negative evaluation by others in individuals with social anxiety/phobia suggests that these individuals hold different beliefs about themselves and others, and about how others see them, than do people who do not experience fear of negative evaluation. This thesis will examine the role of beliefs about self and others in social anxiety/phobia; specifically, how people high and low on social anxiety/phobia evaluate themselves (private self-referent representations), how they believe they are evaluated by others (public self-referent representations) and how they evaluate other people (other-referent representations). Recent models of social anxiety/phobia have differed in the emphasis they place on these various representations of self and others. Five studies addressed this issue by assessing these representations in people high and low on social anxiety/phobia. Previous investigations of the above representations have mostly employed self-report measures, which suffer from serious limitations. The current research employs both self-report measures and performance-based measures to provide a picture of explicit and implicit beliefs or representations about self, about other people and about how people think they are viewed by others. It also assesses how these representations differ in relation to positive, as well as negative, cognitions
Original languageEnglish
QualificationDoctor of Philosophy
Publication statusUnpublished - 2003

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