Influence Of Social Anxiety On Autobiographical Memory And Future Thinking:The Role Of Rumination

Social anxiety is an important factor affecting individual’s cognition and behavior,especially in the student group.Numerous studies have found that social anxiety causes individual memory bias for negative events and negative expectations of future social events.As a negative cognitive processing pattern,rumination significantly correlates with social anxiety.Recent research on social anxiety have increasingly suggested that "rumination" is an important feature in understanding the nature of this disorder,and that individuals with high social anxiety are more likely to spend time thinking about painful or embarrassing social events.However,the mechanism of rumination in social anxiety is not clear,so this study tries to explore the characteristics of rumination in social anxiety college students,as well as post-hoc processing of rumination in social anxiety influencing autobiographical memory and future thinking through qualitative and quantitative research.Objective: To explore the characteristics of rumination and the role of rumination in social anxiety,autobiographical memory and future thinking.Methods: Study 1 adopted the qualitative research method,6 social anxiety college students were interviewed in a semi-structured interview format,and the data were analyzed according to the interpretative phenomenological analysis;Study 2using 519 students from a university in Henan Province as subjects,the study was conducted by using the questionnaire and the self-report method.The questionnaire used the Interactive Anxiety Scale(IAS)and Ruminative Responses Scale(RRS),and autobiographical memory and future thinking measures using the past event sentence completion task and the future event sentence completion task.Results: 1.The rumination characteristics of college students with social anxiety are mainly manifested in four aspects: negative emotion,negative attribution,self-denial and memory bias.2.Social anxiety negatively predicts immersive rumination,Social anxiety is negatively related with autobiographical memory specificity,future thinking specificity and positivity,the relationship between social anxiety and reflective rumination was not significant.3.Immersive rumination negatively predicts autobiographical memory specificity,future thinking specificity and positivity;reflective rumination positively predicts future thinking specificity,autobiographical memory specificity and positivity.4.Autobiographical memory positively correlates with autobiographical memory positivity,future thinking specificity and positivity;autobiographical memory positively correlates with future thinking specificity and positivity;5.Immersive rumination plays a partial mediating role in the influence of social anxiety on autobiographical memory specificity,with mediating effects of 50%;immersive rumination plays a total mediating role in the influence of social anxiety on future thinking specificity,with mediating effects of 36.8%.Conclusion: 1.The rumination characteristics of college students with social anxiety are mainly manifested in four aspects: negative emotion,negative attribution,self-denial and memory bias.2.Social anxiety positively correlates with immersive rumination,but not with reflective rumination.3.Social anxiety negatively predicts the specificity of autobiographical memory and the specificity and protivity of future thinking events.4.Social anxiety can both directly affect the specificity of autobiographical memory and indirectly through the mediation effect of immersive rumination,which plays a complete mediation role between social anxiety and future thinking specificity.5.The effects of social anxiety on autobiographical memory and future thinking work through immersive rumination rather than reflective rumination.