Clinical Psychology Commons^™

Subgrouping Individuals With Generalized Social Phobia: A Classification Based On The Pattern Of Attentional Bias, Jennifer Turkel

Theses and Dissertations

Findings on the pattern of attentional biases in social phobia are mixed. Specifically, some support hypervigilance, some support avoidance, and others evidence an even more complex pattern of vigilance-avoidance. Despite the seemingly contradictory directions of attentional allocation, vigilance and avoidance do not need to be mutually exclusive. They may instead exist within the same person over an extended temporal course of processing. The primary aim for the current study was to examine whether individuals with generalized social phobia characterized by hypervigilant vs. avoidant patterns of attention bias would display different profiles of social anxiety symptoms and their related cognitive and …