Instant messaging communication in social anxiety: no support for the combined cognitive bias hypothesis (CCBH)

Abstract

Abstract The Combined Cognitive Bias Hypothesis (CCBH) postulates that attention and interpretation biases do not work in “solitary,” but nourish each other, interacting in a cyclic or bi-directional manner. While providing initial evidence for the CCBH in social anxiety, most research assessed each bias separately using traditional laboratory-based tasks with different stimuli in each task. Here, we examined the CCBH, assessing both biases within a single ecological-valid task. We hypothesized that compared with control participants, socially anxious participants would interpret ambiguity more negatively and would also attend more to ambiguous (negatively interpreted) information. Participants with high (HAS; n = 30) and low (LSA; n = 30) levels of social anxiety read a fictitious textual conversation (via the WhatsApp instant messaging platform) between two students following their first date, while putting themselves in the shoes of the conversation initiator. The textual conversation featured both ambiguous and irrelevant (hence non-ambiguous) sections regarding the interest of the counterpart to proceed to another date. Participants’ interpretation of each section was evaluated, as was their attention allocation to each section using eye-tracking methodology. No group differences emerged on interpretation of the ambiguous and irrelevant sections– both groups rated the former as more negative than the latter. Conversely, in attention, while LSA participants dwelled longer on the ambiguous (negatively-interpreted) sections, compared to the irrelevant (less negatively-interpreted) ones, HSA participants exhibited the opposite pattern of attention allocation. No evidence emerged for the CCBH in social anxiety when explored within a single ecological-valid task gauging both interpretation and attention.