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Related Experiment Videos

Illusory correlation and social anxiety

P J de Jong1, H Merckelbach, S Bögels

  • 1Department of Experimental Abnormal Psychology, Maastricht University, The Netherlands. p.dejong@dep.unimaas.nl

Behaviour Research and Therapy
|September 16, 1998
PubMed
Summary

Socially anxious women demonstrated an illusory correlation between angry faces and shock. This bias in associating negative stimuli with threatening cues persisted regardless of gender or prior fear levels, suggesting it stems from enduring expectancies.

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Area of Science:

  • Psychology
  • Social Psychology
  • Cognitive Psychology

Background:

  • Illusory correlation (IC) describes a cognitive bias where individuals perceive a relationship between two variables that does not actually exist or is weaker than perceived.
  • Social anxiety is characterized by a fear of negative evaluation and can influence social perception and information processing.
  • Previous research suggests that negative stimuli and threatening cues can be readily associated, potentially contributing to phobic responses.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the presence of a phobia-relevant covariation bias, specifically an illusory correlation (IC), in individuals with varying levels of social anxiety.
  • To examine whether this IC between threatening stimuli (angry faces) and aversive outcomes (shock) is influenced by participant gender or pre-existing fear levels.
  • To explore the temporal nature of the IC, assessing both a priori (during the experiment) and a posteriori (after the experiment) estimations of contingency.

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Main Methods:

  • An experiment involving 60 women (28 low social anxiety, 32 high social anxiety) who viewed slides of angry, happy, and neutral faces paired with either a shock, siren, or no outcome.
  • Participants provided trial-by-trial outcome expectancies and later estimated the contingency between slide/outcome combinations.
  • Stimuli included both women's and men's faces to assess gender effects.

Main Results:

  • Participants exhibited a significant illusory correlation (IC) between angry faces and shock, evident in both initial expectancies and post-experiment estimations.
  • This covariation bias was consistent across participants, irrespective of whether they viewed women's or men's faces.
  • The observed IC was independent of participants' baseline fear levels.

Conclusions:

  • The findings support the hypothesis that illusory correlations between threatening stimuli and negative outcomes can occur in the context of social anxiety.
  • The persistence of this bias, even after extinction trials, suggests it may be driven by pre-existing or rapidly formed expectancies that are resistant to disconfirmation.
  • This research contributes to understanding the cognitive mechanisms underlying social anxiety and phobia development, highlighting the role of biased associative learning.