The spotlight effect and the illusion of transparency in social anxiety

[Clark, D. M., & Wells, A. (1995). A cognitive model of social phobia. In: R. G. Heimberg, M. R. Liebowitz, D. A. Hope, & F. R. Schneier (Eds.), Social phobia: diagnosis, assessment, and treatment (pp. 69–93). New York: Guildford Press] cognitive model of social phobia suggests that both public and private sources of information contribute to the construction of the self as a social object, which is thought to maintain the disorder. This study used two concepts developed in social psychology that might help to explain the processes that contribute to the development of this constructed self. These two concepts are the spotlight effect [Gilovich, T., Medvec, V. H., & Savitsky, K. (2000). The spotlight effect in social judgment: an egocentric bias in estimates of the salience of one’s own actions and appearance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(2), 211–222] and the illusion of transparency [Gilovich, T., Medvec, V. H., & Savitsky, K. (1998). The Illusion of transparency: biased assessments of others’ ability to read one’s own emotional states. Journal of personality and social psychology, 75(2), 332–346]. Participants performed a memory task under either a low or a high social-evaluative condition. In the high social-evaluative condition, participants reported higher levels of the spotlight effect and more negative evaluation of task performance, compared to participants in the low social-evaluative condition. There were no differences between the two conditions in levels of the illusion of transparency. Surprisingly, however, in the low socialevaluative condition, participants reported higher levels of the illusion of transparency than the spotlight effect, whereas, in the high social-evaluative condition, they reported the opposite. Results suggest that the spotlight effect may be specific to social-evaluative concerns, whereas, the illusion of transparency may represent more general features of social anxiety concerns. Implications of the results for Clark and Wells’ cognitive model of social phobia model are discussed

The method of fundamental solutions for three-dimensional inverse geometric elasticity problems

We investigate the numerical reconstruction of smooth star-shaped voids (rigid inclusions and cavities) which are compactly contained in a three-dimensional isotropic linear elastic medium from a single set of Cauchy data (i.e. nondestructive boundary displacement and traction measurements) on the accessible outer boundary. This inverse geometric problem in three-dimensional elasticity is approximated using the method of fundamental solutions (MFS). The parameters describing the boundary of the unknown void, its centre, and the contraction and dilation factors employed for selecting the fictitious surfaces where the MFS sources are to be positioned, are taken as unknowns of the problem. In this way, the original inverse geometric problem is reduced to finding the minimum of a nonlinear least-squares functional that measures the difference between the given and computed data, penalized with respect to both the MFS constants and the derivative of the radial coordinates describing the position of the star-shaped void. The interior source points are anchored and move with the void during the iterative reconstruction procedure. The feasibility of this new method is illustrated in several numerical examples

The perseverative worry bout: a review of cognitive, affective and motivational factors that contribute to worry perseveration

This paper reviews the cognitive, affective and attentional factors that contribute to individual perseverative worry bouts. We describe how automatic biases in attentional and interpretational processes contribute to threat detection and to the inclusion of negative intrusive thoughts into the worry stream typical of the “what if …?” thinking style of pathological worriers. The review also describes processes occurring downstream from these perceptual biases that also facilitate perseveration, including cognitive biases in beliefs about the nature of the worry process, the automatic deployment of strict goal-directed responses for dealing with the threat, the role of negative mood in facilitating effortful forms of information processing (i.e. systematic information processing styles), and in providing negative information for evaluating the success of the worry bout. We also consider the clinical implications of this model for an integrated intervention programme for pathological worrying

Run Away or Stick Together? The Impact of Organization-Specific Adverse Events on Alliance Partner Defection

Alliances are inter-organizational relationships wherein partners agree to engage in joint action and share benefits and burdens. But when might an adverse event that strikes one partner become too burdensome for another partner? Extant theories of alliance instability provide incomplete answers, which is problematic: for stricken organizations, anticipating whether their non-stricken partners will remain in the alliance can be essential for survival. Integrating insights from alliance dynamics and organizational stigma literatures, we theorize how an organization-specific adverse event affects a non-stricken partner's decision to continue with or defect from an alliance by considering factors that shift the balance between cohesive and disruptive forces. We propose that high stigmatization risk will increase the probability of partner defection through two disruptive mechanisms: relational uncertainty and stigma anxiety. Building on the idea that the same factors contributing to alliance formation may also condition partner defection, we theorize about the roles of partner resource interdependencies, relational embeddedness, and perceived partner similarity in amplifying or attenuating disruptive mechanisms triggered by an adverse event. We extend the research on partner defection and alliance instability by advancing an event-based view of alliance instability and specifying the conditions under which an alliance partner might defect

Flaw identification using the inverse dual boundary element method

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:DX183725 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Cognitive biases in social anxiety : an experimental study of the Clark/Wells model

This study examined cognitive processing of internal and external sources of information during social interactions. Socially anxious (N=58) and nonanxious (N=58) male and female students participated in a social interaction with a confederate and then completed measures of attentional focus, social judgment, memory for various types of social information, and rumination. Compared to nonanxious participants, socially anxious participants selectively attended to self versus partner information, displayed greater judgmental biases, recalled less partner-related and more self-related information, and displayed greater post-interaction rumination. State anxiety did not significantly affect memory. The results suggested that socially anxious subjects displayed selective attention and encoding rather than selective retrieval of social information.Arts, Faculty ofPsychology, Department ofGraduat