Measuring online interpretations and attributions of social situations: Links with adolescent social anxiety

Attention allocation and social worries predict interpretations of peer-related social cues in adolescents

“…There is some evidence that biases in interpretations are more pronounced when the social material is self-referential (e.g., Amin et al, 1998, Vassilopoulos and Banerjee, 2012). Previous studies required participants to rate several interpretations for each scene (Miers et al, 2008, Haller et al, 2016). We only displayed a single interpretation for each scene; while we did find associations between social anxiety levels and absolute interpretation ratings across scenes, evaluating two interpretations for each scene may result in stronger links between ratings and social anxiety and also bring out effects of self-relevance that may be subtler.…”

“…Peer portrayals ranged from positive to negative expressions and gestures. In a previous study using a subset of the scenes, we showed that scenes varied on a continuum of ambiguity with even the most valenced scenes appraised differently across participants (Haller et al, 2016). To ensure that scenes assigned to Self and Other condition were matched as closely as possible, we coded them for positive and negative gestures.…”

“…These studies suggest that at least by mid-adolescence, biases in the interpretation of ambiguous social-evaluative material consistently characterize adolescents with SAD and link with individual differences in social anxiety levels in adolescents from the community (Giannini and Loscalzo, 2016, Haller et al, 2016, Miers et al, 2008). It should be noted that there is some contention as to the degree to which these cognitions purely reflect a started perception of reality or are grounded to some degree in a social skill deficit (e.g., Miers et al, 2011).…”

“…We used a modified version of the picture-based, free-viewing interpretation task (Haller et al, 2016) to measure interpretations and scanning patterns of naturalistic social scenes. We assessed the hypothesis that biases in the interpretation of ambiguous material are linked to social anxiety levels and manifest in attentional allocation while scanning visual scenes.…”

Investigating the Relationship Between Attribution Styles and Metacognitive Skills With Fear of Success Among Students

“…The helplessness as a result of pessimistic attribution style by creating the cognitive, emotional, and physical disorders such as anxiety and stress reduced quality of life (46). Haller et al (2016) have proved the relationship between the anxiety and negative attributions (47). The results of Yazdanpanah-Nozari et al (2011) have shown that the dominant attribution style of students are the external styles that have opposite effects on motivation, effort, and success (48).…”