Dementia is a common neurodegenerative condition involving the deterioration of cognitive and communication skills. Pausing in the speech of people with dementia is a dysfluency that may be used to signal conversational trouble in social interaction. This study aimed to examine the speech-pausing profile within picture description samples from people with dementia and healthy controls (HCs) within the DementiaBank database using the Calpy computational speech processing toolkit. Sixty English-speaking participants between the ages of 53 and 88 years (Mage = 67.43, SD = 8.33; 42 females) were included in the study: 20 participants with mild cognitive impairment, 20 participants with moderate cognitive impairment, and 20 HCs. Quantitative analysis shows a progressive increase in the duration of pausing between HCs, the mild dementia group, and the moderate dementia group, respectively.
The findings suggest that social threat induced anticipatory processing facilitates executive functioning for low socially anxious individuals when anticipating a social-evaluative situation.
Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is a debilitating psychological disorder characterised by excessive fears of one or more social or performance situations, where there is potential for evaluation by others. A recently expanded cognitive-behavioural model of SAD emphasizes that both the fear of negative evaluation (FNE) and the fear of positive evaluation (FPE) contribute to enduring symptoms of SAD. Research also suggests that socially anxious individuals may show biases toward threat relevant stimuli, such as angry faces. The current study utilised a modified version of the pictorial dot-probe task in order to examine whether FNE and FPE mediate the relationship between social anxiety and an attentional bias. A group of 38 participants with moderate to high levels of self-reported social anxiety were tested in groups of two to four people and were advised that they would be required to deliver an impromptu speech. All participants then completed an assessment of attentional bias using angry-neutral, happy-neutral, and angry-happy face pairs. Conditions were satisfied for only one mediation model, indicating that the relationship between social anxiety and attentional avoidance of angry faces was mediated by FPE. These findings have important clinical implications for types of treatment concerning cognitive symptoms of SAD, along with advancing models of social anxiety. Limitations and ideas for future research from the current study were also discussed.
Cognitive models of social anxiety disorder (SAD) emphasize post-event processing as a prominent maintaining factor that occurs after social-evaluative events. Post-event processing involves repetitive negative thinking revolved around perceived social failure. The present review concentrates on the relevant and available empirical literature on post-event processing in social anxiety which centres on Clarke and Wells (1995) theoretical framework. Correlational and experimental studies have investigated the relationship between post-event processing and the behavioural, physiological, cognitive and affective outcomes for socially anxious individuals. The majority of study designs include those investigating post-event processing in response to social-evaluative threat, and in response to treatment. Limitations of the existing literature are discussed and suggestions for future research examining the underlying cognitive functions of post-event processing are proposed.
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