The Impact Of Post-event Processing On The Memory Bias In Social Anxiety

Following real-life social encounters, people with severe social anxiety ruminate for hours or even days over their perceivedsocial failures, a process known in the cognitive model of social phobia as post-event processing. Individuals may brood overthis negative material (post-event processing), further distorting or reconstructing their memory for the index event overprogressively longer intervals after that event has concluded, and contributing to a bias in memory recall of negativeautobiographical memories. The researchers have conducted studies to explore the relationship between the post-processing andsocial anxiety, and the impact of post-event processing on the retrieval of autobiographical memories. Although previous studieshave explored the effects of content of post-event processing (positive/negative content)or the mode of post-event processing(analytical/experiential mode) on memory bias，they didn’t take into account the combined effects of the content of post-eventprocessing and the mode of post-processing on memory bias. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to further explore thecontent of post-event processing and the mode of post-event processing mode on memory bias in social anxiety.This study can be divided into two parts containing four experiments, which systematically examines the effects that thecontent of post-event processing has on the memory bias in social anxiety, the effects that the mode of post-event processing hason the memory bias in social anxiety, the effects that the content of post-event processing has on the memory bias in socialanxiety under the condition of using analytical model, as well as the effects that the content of post-event processing has on thememory bias in social anxiety under the condition of using experiential mode. The main conclusions are as follows:1. Relative to the negative post-event processing,positive post-event processing led to more recall of positive feedback in highsocially anxiety. However, similar results do not appear in the low social anxiety.2. Relative to the experiential post-event processing, positive analytical post-event processing led to more recall of positivefeedback in high socially anxiety. However, similar results do not appear in the low social anxiety.3. Relative to the positive analytical post-event processing, negative analytical post-event processing led to more recall ofpositive feedback in high socially anxiety. However, similar results do not appear in the low social anxiety.4. Relative to the negative experiential post-event processing, positive experiential post-event processing led to more recall ofpositive feedback in high socially anxiety. However, similar results do not appear in the low social anxiety.