The Mechanism Of Interpretation Bias Of Social Anxiety In Military Personnel

Background and Objective:Social Anxiety(SA)is a common psychological problem in military personnel.It affects the normal interpersonal communication of individuals and lead to adverse reactions such as avoidance and fear of crowds,which will seriously influence the normal life.Previous studies have found that factors affecting social anxiety include genes,parenting style,attachment style,personality traits,self-esteem,evaluation of fear and cognitive factors,etc.Among them,fear of evaluation from others,including Fear of Negative Evaluation(FNE)as well as Fear of Positive Evaluation(FPE),is an important factor.The role of cognitive bias in the development of social anxiety is a hot research issue in recent years.Cognitive Bias mainly included Attentional Bias(AB)and Interpretation Bias(IB).It is found that people with social anxiety tend to pay attention to negative information,which is manifested as being vigilant-avoidant to threat stimuli or difficulty in disengaging attention from threat stimuli.The negative interpretation bias of social anxiety is mainly manifested as the negative interpretation of ambiguous information.To change the negative cognitive bias in social anxiety,the researchers developed Attentional Bias Modification(ABM)and Interpretation Bias Modification Program(IMP)to intervene the maladaptive cognitive processing.Based on the current research progress,three studies were designed to explore the cognitive bias mechanism of social anxiety in military personal.Firstly,the relationship between social anxiety and interpretive bias and fear evaluation in soldiers was discussed,and the mediating effect of negative and positive fear evaluation was also explored.Secondly,the interaction of different cognitive bias in social anxiety of soldiers was explored and the combined cognitive bias hypothesis was tested.Thirdly,the interpretation modification program was designed to change the biased interpretation procedures,and its effectiveness was verified.Methods:Study 1: The Interaction anxious Scale(IAS),the Fear of positive evaluation Scale(FPES)and the Brief Fear of Negative evaluation Scale(BFNES)have been applied,negative cognitive processing bias questionnaire and self-compiled military interpretation bias measurement tool were used to measure the social anxiety and influence factors of in904 military personnel.There were two experiments in Study 2.In Experiment 1,98 health adults were selected as subjects,and their attention bias was measured by dot-probe task paradigm,interpretation bias was measured by sentence completion task,and social anxiety data were collected by using IAS.The relationship between AB,IB and SA was discussed.In Experiment 2,53 adults with high and low social anxiety were taken as subjects.Word Sentence Association Paradigm(WASP)was used to measure the online and offline interpretation bias of the subjects,and the eye movement data of the subjects were recorded when the words were presented,so as to reflect the attention processing of the subjects.In Study 3,49 healthy adults were randomly selected as subjects.A randomized controlled study was designed to compare the changes of interpretive bias and social anxiety before and after interpretive bias training in the intervention group(IMP,N=26)and the control group(ICC,N=23).In the study,IMP training materials were localized at first,and IMP training was conducted for 5 times in the intervention group;the control group received controlled training for 5 times at the same time.Subjects' levels of AB,IB and social anxiety were measured before and after training.Results:The results of Study 1 showed that the self-compiled military interpretation bias measurement tool showed good reliability and validity.FNE and FPE play a partial mediating role in explaining the relationship between bias and social anxiety,and the effect size of FPE was larger.The results of Experiment 1 of Study 2 showed that there was no significant correlation among the behavioral data of the two biased cognitive processes at the behavioral level.And results of Experiment 2 showed that the participants with high social anxiety chose the positive explanation significantly less than those with low social anxiety,which reflected the offline explanation bias in social anxiety.The results of eye movement data showed that the social anxiety level of the subjects was related to the latency of the first gaze on the threatening stimulus,indicating that the higher the social anxiety level was related to later early gaze on the threatening stimulus,showing early attention avoidance.For overall eye movement data,results showed that the total fixation time on threat stimuli was significantly lower than that on the non-threat stimulus,indicating attentional avoidance.The analyses of segmenting eye movement data showed that the correlation coefficient between the fixation time and the interpretation bias was increasing with the presentation time of threating stimuli,which reflected the relationship between the dynamic change of attentional bias and the interpretation bias.Study 3 showed that after 5 times of training,positive interpretation greater increased,negative interpretation greater decreased,interpretation bias and anxiety levels were improved significantly in the IMP group compared to the ICC group.However,the change in attention bias in the intervention group and the control group was consistent,indicating that the explanation bias training could not effectively improve attention bias.Conclusions:It could be speculated for the study that social anxiety first plays a role in early attention avoidance in different interpersonal situations,and promotes the response of avoidance in interpersonal situations.Subsequently,interpersonal anxious people further avoid negative information,and this process can lead to changes in their subsequent interpretation bias.Since no effect of explanation bias on attention bias was found in study 3,the relationship between attention avoidance and online explanation bias found in study 2 might be unidirectional: attention bias affects interpretation bias,but the latter might have no negative feedback path.Interpretation bias affects the emotion of positive and negative evaluation and generates fear,which is the core emotional reaction symptom of social anxiety.At the same time,since most of the evidence provided in this study is of relevant level,it can be believed that social anxiety will in turn affect the whole cognitive processing process.This study might shed light on the cognitive process of social anxiety,and could provide new methods and perspectives for the improvement of military personal' mental health.