Social-evaluative threat and cognitive performance in socially anxious and nonanxious individuals

Socially anxious (n=35) and nonanxious (n=35) individuals completed seven neutral cognitive tasks representing a wide range of information processing stages. Participants were assigned to one of two conditions: a social-evaluative threat condition in which they performed an impromptu speech in front of a peer rater prior to each task, or a non-threat condition in which they read silently from a book prior to each task. Contrary to expectation, both groups reported equally higher subjective levels of discomfort in the social-evaluative threat condition than in the non-threat condition. Socially anxious participants performed more poorly than nonanxious participants on Digit Span in the social-evaluative threat condition. When analyses were limited to instances in which participants reported the greatest amounts of subjective discomfort, results indicated that social-evaluative threat facilitated performance of socially anxious participants but inhibited the performance of nonanxious participants on two memory tasks. Results are interpreted in light of possible independent contributions of subjective discomfort and task difficulty.