The Implicit Attitude And Its Intervention Of Fear Of Negative Evaluation In High Social Anxiety Student

Objective:Social anxiety mainly refers to the negative emotional experience that individuals experience in the process of getting along with others.Previous studies have shown that social anxiety not only affects people’s normal social interactions,damages people’s mental health but also damages people’s physical health(Dan,1996;Buckner et al.,2008),Social anxiety has become the third mental health problem in the world after depression and alcoholism.Fear of negative evaluation(FNE)is the core characteristic of social anxiety,therefore,the study of fear of negative evaluation can help us to deepen our understanding of social anxiety,so as to better prevent and intervene in the early stage of social anxiety.From the existing research on fear of negative evaluation,most of the studies are focus on the explicit level,and seldom discuss fear of negative evaluation from the implicit level.In view of this,this study investigated the implicit attitude towards fear of negative evaluation and its relationship with explicit attitude among college students with high social anxiety,and on the basis of this explored the situation effect of implicit fear of negative evaluation and its intervention measures.Method:The study includes three experiments.In experiment 1,60 college students with high and low social anxiety were selected by the Brief Fear of Negative Scale,Interaction Anxiousness Scale,Self-Rating Depression Scale and Positive and Negative Affect Scale,then the classical AMP was used to explore the implicit and explicit attitudes of college students with high and low social anxiety towards fear of negative evaluation and the relationship between the two kinds of attitudes.Implicit attitude uses 2(group: high social anxiety,low social anxiety)× 3(priming stimulus type: positive evaluation words,neutral words,negative evaluation words)two factors mixed experimental design;Explicit attitude uses 2(group: high social anxiety,low social anxiety)× 2(priming stimulus type: positive evaluation words,negative evaluation words)two factors mixed experimental design.The group is between-subject variable,priming stimulus type is within-subject variable,the dependent variable of implicit attitude is the rating scale of target stimulus(meaningless letter combination),the dependent variable of explicit attitude is the rating scale of positive and negative evaluation words.In experiment 2,90 college students with high social anxiety were selected,uses 3(situational stimulus type: ability positive words,ability negative words,neutral words)× 2(implicit start type: negative evaluation words,positive evaluation words)two factors mixed experiment design,and situational stimulus type is between-subject variable,implicit start type is within-subject variable,the dependent variable is the rating scale of target stimulus(meaningless letter combination).In experiment 3,64 college students with high social anxiety were selected,uses EC and IAT methods,by comparing the changes of IAT effect values before and after the intervention to discusses the effectiveness of EC technology on fear of negative evaluation of implicit attitude of college students with high social anxiety.Results:(1)High and low social anxiety college students’ implicit score in negative evaluation words was significantly lower than that of positive evaluation words and neutral words;(2)High social anxiety college students’ implicit score of negative evaluation words was significantly lower than that of students with low social anxiety;(3)College students with high social anxiety had significantly higher explicit score than implicit score,while college students with low social anxiety had no difference in explicit score and implicit score;(4)The implicit scores of negative evaluation words were significantly higher in the ability positive situation than in the ability negative situation and neutral situation;(5)Before and after intervention training,the change of IAT effect value in the experimental group and the control group was significantly different,and the change of IAT effect value in the experimental group was significantly higher than that in the control group.Conclusions:(1)High and low social anxiety college students have negative implicit attitude towards FNE,and the implicit attitude of students with high social anxiety to FNE is more negative;(2)In college students with high social anxiety,there was a separation of implicit and explicit attitudes towards FNE,while low social anxiety college students tended to agree on the two attitudes towards FNE;(3)The implicit attitude of college students with high social anxiety towards FNE has situational effect,and the FNE is significantly lower in the positive situation of ability than in the neutral situation and the negative situation of ability;(4)Subthreshold evaluative conditioning technique can effectively intervene the implicit attitude of high social anxiety college students to fear of negative evaluation.